EPIC has sent a statement to the House Energy and Commerce Committee in advance of a hearing on “Oversight of the Federal Trade Commission.” EPIC told the Committee to urge the new FTC leadership to enforce the Facebook Consent Order and unwind the Facebook-WhatsApp merger As EPIC previously told Congress, the Cambridge Analytica breach could have been avoided if the FTC had enforced its 2011 Consent Order against Facebook. That Order was the result of detailed complaints filed by EPIC and consumer privacy organizations in 2009 and 2010. In 2014, EPIC and the Center for Digital Democracy urged the FTC to block Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp unless appropriate privacy safeguards were put in place. In 2016, EPIC and CDD filed a second complaint after Facebook broke its privacy promises and began collecting WhatsApp users' data.
EPIC wrote to FAA Acting Administrator Daniel K. Elwell today to request that the agency livestream the FAA Drone Advisory Committee meeting that takes place tomorrow in Santa Clara. Earlier this year, EPIC filed suit against the Drone Committee, alleging that it had conducted much of its work in secret and ignored the privacy risks posed by the deployment of drones. As EPIC explained in the request for public streaming, “the FAA’s Drone Advisory Committee plays a key role in setting public policy on drone deployment for the United States, yet the public is largely excluded from this process. This secrecy is of particular concern given ongoing public concerns about the deployment of drones in the United States.”
In advance of a hearing on Filtering Practices of Social Media Companies, EPIC has sent a statement to the House Judiciary Committee. EPIC said that "algorithmic transparency" could help establish fairness, transparency, and accountability for much of what users see online. In 2011, EPIC sent a letter to the FTC stating that Google's acquisition of YouTube led to a skewing of search results after Google substituted its secret "relevance" ranking for the original objective ranking, based on hits and ratings. The FTC took no action on EPIC's complaint. But last year, after a seven year investigation, the European Commission found that Google rigged search results to give preference to its own shopping service. The Commission required Google to change its algorithm to rank its own shopping comparison the same way it ranks its competitors.
