Grant Gross

The U.S. White House will push for online businesses to adopt new privacy codes of conduct, including consumer rights to control what information websites collect about them and a right to see what data is being collected, officials there said.

Members of President Barack Obama's administration will officially announce details about its so-called privacy bill of rights on Thursday, with the effort focused on government working with private businesses, privacy groups and other experts to develop voluntary privacy codes of conduct.

U.S. Internet service providers should take new steps to protect subscribers against cyberattacks, including notifying customers when their computers are compromised, the chairman of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission said Wednesday.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski called on ISPs to notify subscribers whose computers are infected with malware and tied to a botnet and to develop a code of conduct to combat botnets. Genachowski also called on ISPs to adopt secure routing standards to protect against Internet Protocol hijacking and to implement DNSSEC, a suite of security tools for the Internet's Domain Name System.

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission must block Verizon Wireless from buying wireless spectrum from cable providers because two proposed deals would concentrate too much spectrum in the hands of one company, a coalition of advocacy groups said.

The deals, which also allow Verizon and the cable firms resell each others' services, "give rise to serious concern that not only will these providers decline to compete further with one another, they will actively collude with one another," the groups said in a Tuesday filing with the FCC.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission should force Google to halt its plan to consolidate user identities across its services and fine the company for violating an October privacy settlement with the agency, privacy group the Center for Digital Democracy said in a complaint filed Wednesday.

Google is not making the changes to its privacy policy to provide convenience to users, as it claims, but to better track them and deliver targeted advertising, the CDD complaint said. "Google has communicated its real plans to expand data targeting throughout all it services, and to better compete against Facebook, to its advertising customers," said Jeffrey Chester, CDD's executive director. "They have failed to tell the truth to consumers."

The operators of file-sharing site Megaupload are facing new charges, after the U.S. Department of Justice has filed a superseding indictment charging the nine defendants with additional counts of criminal copyright infringement and wire fraud.

The superseding indictment, filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia Thursday, alleges that the defendants reproduced materials from other websites, including YouTube, and made them available on Megaupload.

The U.S. Congress has passed legislation that will allow the U.S. Federal Communications Commission to set aside a piece of unlicensed spectrum before new mobile spectrum auctions, despite opposition from some lawmakers who wanted all the available spectrum to be auctioned.

The spectrum provisions were attached to a bill, approved Friday by the U.S. House of Representative and Senate, that will extend payroll tax breaks.

Google's alleged circumvention of do-not-track controls on Apple's Safari browser could lead to big fines from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission if the agency determines Google has violated a privacy settlement the company agreed to in March, some privacy advocates said Friday.

Violations of a settlement with the FTC can lead to fines of $16,000 per violation, per day. It's unclear how many times Google may have circumvented do-not-track protections on the Safari browser, distributed
with iPhones, iPads, some iPods and Macintosh computers.

Leaders in the U.S. Senate are trying to fast-track new cybersecurity legislation that will create costly new regulations for some businesses, some critics said Thursday.

A plan by Senate Democrats to move the Cybersecurity Act, introduced this week, directly to the Senate floor for a vote raises serious questions about the process and will lead to bureaucrats at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security writing regulations for businesses that control critical infrastructure, said Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican, during a hearing on the bill.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security's practice of monitoring social media services could lead to abuse and could discourage U.S. residents from speaking out against the government, several lawmakers said Thursday.

Several members of the U.S. House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee's intelligence subcommittee questioned a recently revealed DHS contract for General Dynamics to monitor media stories that reflect adversely on DHS or the U.S. government.

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission has approved new rules requiring telemarketers that use autodialed or prerecorded telephone calls to sell products to get written approval from customers before sending them the robocalls.

An order adopted by the FCC on Wednesday also does away with an earlier exception to robocalling rules that allowed telemarketers to call customers with whom they had a pre-existing relationship. Under previous rules, U.S. residents could sign up for a national do-not-call list.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has rejected attempts by three telecom companies to block shareholder votes on whether they should commit to net neutrality principles.

This week, the SEC declined to act on requests by AT&T, Verizon Communications and Sprint Nextel to block the votes. All three companies had argued that net neutrality was not a significant policy issue under SEC definitions and, therefore, they weren't required to put the matter to a shareholder vote.

A bill in the U.S. Senate would require operators of so-called critical infrastructure networks to adopt cybersecurity practices if evaluations by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security find their security lacking.

The new bill, introduced Tuesday by four senators, would cover operators of systems that, if compromised, would cause mass death, evacuation or major damage to the U.S. economy, said the sponsors, including Senator Joe Lieberman, a Connecticut independent and chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.