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Last week made history with the CEOs of some of the world’s biggest tech companies, Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon, were brought to face off with the US Congress on July 29. This was also the first time one of America’s richest people (Bezos) had to testify in front of Congress. The hearing was called to focus on whether the companies abuse their dominant positions in the market. It comes as law makers consider new tough(er) regulations.
Next, Garmin has been all over the headlines this week. The navigation company was hit by a massive ransomware attack on Thursday, leaving its customers unable to use its services. Garmin is reportedly being asked to pay a $10 million ransom to free its system (yikes!)
In other news, there has been a lot of back and forth with Instacart and if they were the victims of a data breach where some of their customers data was being sold on the dark web for around $2 a customer.
In our bandwidth section, we discuss the newly launched Financial Data Exchange in Canada, an organization whose aim is to create the industry standard for financial data sharing. We will also look at what’s happening in Australia and Google, with Google being in some hot water over there over claims of misleading users over data privacy issues (again). Finally on the lighter side of news, we look at how organizations are planning on making great use of all the data collected during the Pandemic.
Stay safe and have a great week!
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The leaders of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google took on congress last Wednesday as both Democrats and Republicans confronted the tech executives for wielding their market power to overtake competitors and amass data, customers and of course those sky high profits.
Editorial: Lawmakers just raked Big Tech CEOs over the coals
The chairman of the antitrust panel, Cicilline, opened a congressional investigation of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google last year, aiming to explore whether the tech industry’s most influential quartet of companies had attained their status through potentially anti-competitive means.
Too powerful? US Congress grills tech giants' CEOs over behaviour
Zuckerberg faced questions about emails pertaining to Facebooks purchase of Instagram and Whatsapp (in efforts to stifle the competition) amongst other somewhat shady ways of collecting data on their competitors wile Bezos was grilled for allegations of tapping data from third party sellers to boost sale of its own products. Google’s CEO had to fend off questions pertaining to YouTube improperly collecting personal information about children as well defending Google’s decision to phase out cookies, as other browsers have already done. He did note that Google does collect information about its users from Search and other services to inform personal ads. Tim Cook took the stand to answer questions about Apple’s app store and its decision to remove certain apps (like kid tracking apps), as well as their fees and commissions structures for developers.
Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google grilled on Capitol Hill over their market power
So what happens now? Congressman Cicilline is expected to issue a report in August which will outline the case for updating federal competition rules that would give regulators more power to probe and penalize the industry. This could be a huge win for Congress in attempts to better regulate big tech.
In other news, Garmin has been having a terrible week, as the wearable fitness gadgets giant revealed that they had been a victim of a cyber-attack. Garmin is still recovering from the fallout of the devastating ransomware attack that has crippled its website, disrupted customer support, disabled apps, and paused communications since late July 22.
The GPS maker scrambled to contain the aftermath of an attack as employees took to social media to describe what was happening, claiming the company was hit with a damaging ransomware attack that locked them out of significant portions of their own system globally.
As analysts and insiders have noted, the attack was most likely launched by a Russia-based cybercrime organization aptly named Evil Corp due to the use of the WastedLocker strain of malware.
Since using the ransomware, the attackers have demanded ransoms ranging from $500,000 to over $10 million in bitcoin, according to Curtis Simpson, CISO at IoT security firm Armis.
Will Garmin Pay $10 Million Ransom To End Two-Day Outage?
Garmin apps, website start to return after cyberattack
Instacart has been in the news recently with a lot of back and forth, dealing with their own data breach. The company has found that hundreds of thousands of Instacart customers were being sold online, on the dark web for about $2 a person (good to know what your worth is eh?). Instacart is stating that credential stuffing is to blame and most likely not a data breach.
Thousands of Instacart customer details sold online
The names, the last four digits of credit card numbers and other personal information belonging to hundreds of thousands of Instacart customers were being sold online. The information up for grabs also included order history and addresses, the outlet reports.
Instacart blames reused passwords for account hacks, but customers are still without basic 2 factor security.
Instacart user data is reportedly being sold online, but the company denies there was a breach
Bandwidth
In exciting Canadian news, the Financial Data Exchange, a non for profit organization dedicated to developing an industry standard for financial data sharing has officially launched in Canada.
FINANCIAL DATA EXCHANGE LAUNCHES IN CANADA LOOKING TO CREATE INDUSTRY STANDARD FOR FINANCIAL DATA SHARING
The companies joining as “initial members” of the FDX Canada Working Group include Bank of Montreal, Capital One, CIBC, Desjardins, FinTech Growth Syndicate, Flinks, Interac Corp., Koho, Plaid, and Visa, as well as a number of major banks, among others.
The FDX mission is to work together to promote Open Banking through the development of a secure, common, interoperable, flexible and royalty-free industry standard for financial data sharing.
The FI and Fintech Opportunity with Open Banking
Canada is in the process of a lengthy Open Banking review. The Department of Finance Canada set up an Advisory Committee on the issue in 2018 to investigate whether the country should follow the UK in making it easier for people to let third party financial services providers access their banking data.
Our friends down under are looking at Google closely, as Australian regulators says Google misled users over data privacy issues.
ACCC sues Google for collecting Australian users’ data without informed consent
In court documents, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) accused Google of not explicitly getting consent or properly informing consumers of a 2016 move to combine personal information in Google accounts with browsing activities on non-Google websites.
Australian watchdog accuses Google of privacy breaches
Noise
On the brighter side of things, various countries have begun to post the positive vaccine trials that have been completed, inching us closer to finding something that will help stop the spread and treat those currently effected. Britain, the US, the UK and Canada have all commented on the helpful data sets that have been informing their strategies around developing the vaccine.
J&J starts human study of COVID-19 vaccine after promising monkey data
Coronavirus vaccine development ‘progressing well’, says U.K. drugmaker
A huge experiment’: How the world made so much progress on a Covid-19 vaccine so fast
That’s all folks! Have a great week!