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Executives at Instagram are planning to build a version of the popular photo-sharing app that can be used by children under the age of 13, according to an internal company post obtained by BuzzFeed News. “I’m excited to announce that going forward, we have identified youth work as a priority for Instagram and have added it to our H1 priority list,” Vishal Shah, Instagram’s vice president of product, wrote on an employee message board on Thursday. “We will be building a new youth pillar within the Community Product Group to focus on two things: (a) accelerating our integrity and privacy work to ensure the safest possible experience for teens and (b) building a version of Instagram that allows people under the age of 13 to safely use Instagram for the first time.” The current Instagram policy forbids children under the age of 13 from using the service. According to the post, the work would be overseen by Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, and led by Pavni Diwanji, a vice president who joined parent company Facebook in December. Previously, Diwanji worked at Google, where she oversaw the search giant’s children-focused products, including YouTube Kids. The internal announcement comes two days after Instagram said it needs to do more to protect its youngest users. Following coverage and public criticism of the abuse, bullying, or predation faced by teens on the app, the company published a blog post on Tuesday titled “Continuing to Make Instagram Safer for the Youngest Members of Our Community.” That post makes no mention of Instagram’s intent to build a product for children under the age of 13, but states, “We require everyone to be at least 13 to use Instagram and have asked new users to provide their age when they sign up for an account for some time.” The announcement lays the groundwork for how Facebook — whose family of products is used by 3.3 billion people every month — plans to expand its user base. While various laws limit how companies can build products for and target children, Instagram clearly sees kids under 13 as a viable growth segment, particularly because of the app’s popularity among teens. In a short interview, Mosseri told BuzzFeed News that the company knows that “more and more kids” want to use apps like Instagram and that it was a challenge verifying their age, given most people don’t get identification documents until they are in their mid-to-late teens. “We have to do a lot here,” he said, “but part of the solution is to create a version of Instagram for young people or kids where parents have transparency or control. It’s one of the things we’re exploring.” Mosseri added that it was early in Instagram’s development of the product and that the company doesn’t yet have a “detailed plan.” Priya Kumar, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Maryland who researches how social media affects families, said a version of Instagram for children is a way for Facebook to hook in young people and normalize the idea “that social connections exist to be monetized.” “From a privacy perspective, you're just legitimizing children’s interactions being monetized in the same way that all of the adults using these platforms are,” she said. Kumar said children who use YouTube Kids often migrate to the main YouTube platform, which is a boon for the company and concern for parents. “A lot of children, either by choice or by accident, migrate onto the broader YouTube platform,” she said. “Just because you have a platform for kids, it doesn’t mean the kids are going to stay there.” The development of an Instagram product for kids follows the 2017 launch of Messenger Kids, a Facebook product aimed at children between the ages of 6 and 12. After the product’s launch, a group of more than 95 advocates for children’s health sent a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, calling for him to discontinue the product and citing research that “excessive use of digital devices and social media is harmful to children and teens, making it very likely this new app will undermine children’s healthy development.” Facebook said it had consulted an array of experts in developing Messenger Kids. Wired later revealed that the company had a financial relationship with most of the people and organizations that had advised on the product.Details can be found on OUR FORUM.
Google is going it alone with its proposed advertising technology to replace third-party cookies. Every major browser that uses the open-source Chromium project has declined to use it, and it’s unclear what that will mean for the future of advertising on the web. A couple of weeks ago, Google announced it was beginning to test a new ad technology inside Google Chrome called the Federated Learning of Cohorts or FLoC. It uses an algorithm to look at your browser history and place you in a group of people with similar browsing histories so that advertisers can target you. It’s more private than cookies, but it’s also complicated and has some potential privacy implications of its own if it’s not implemented right. Google Chrome is built on an open-source project, and so FLoC was implemented as part of that project that other browsers could include. I am not aware of any Chromium-based browser outside of Google’s own that will implement it and very aware of many that will refuse. One note I’ll drop here is that I am relieved that nobody else is implementing FLoC right away, because the way FLoC is constructed puts a very big responsibility on a browser maker. If implemented badly, FLoC could leak out sensitive information. It’s a complicated technology that does appear to keep you semi-anonymous, but there are enough details to hide dozens of devils. Anyway, here’s Brave: “The worst aspect of FLoC is that it materially harms user privacy, under the guise of being privacy-friendly.” And here’s Vivaldi: “We will not support the FLoC API and plan to disable it, no matter how it is implemented. It does not protect the privacy and it certainly is not beneficial to users, to unwittingly give away their privacy for the financial gain of Google.” As you probably know, Opera has a long history of introducing privacy features that benefit our users: it was the first major browser to introduce built-in ad blocking, browser VPN and other privacy-centric features. The significance now is the end of third-party cookies, which will reduce the amount of cross-website tracking on the web. While we and other browsers are discussing new and better privacy-preserving advertising alternatives to cookies including FloC, we have no current plans to enable features like this in the Opera browsers in their current form. Generally speaking, we do, however, think it’s too early to say in which direction the market will move or what the major browsers will do. DuckDuckGo isn’t thought of as a browser, but it does make browsers for iOS and Android. On desktop, it’s already made a browser extension for other browsers to block it. And the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is very much against FLoC, has even made a website to let you know if you’re one of the few Chrome users who have been included in Google’s early tests. But maybe the most important Chromium-based browser not made by Google is Microsoft Edge. It is a big test for Google’s proposed FLoC technology: if Microsoft isn’t going to support it, that would pretty much mean Chrome really will be going it alone with this technology. As for Apple’s Safari, I will admit I didn’t reach out for comment because at this point it’s not difficult to guess what the answer will be. Apple, after all, deserves some credit for changing everybody’s default views on privacy. However, the story here is actually much more interesting than you might guess at first. John Wilander is a WebKit engineer at Apple who works on Safari’s privacy-enhancing Intelligent Tracking Prevention features. Wilander’s reply jibes with Microsoft’s statement that “the industry is on a journey” when it comes to balancing new advertising technologies and privacy. But it speaks to something really important: web standards people take their jobs seriously and are seriously committed to the web standards process that creates the open web. Read this posting in its entirety on OUR FORUM.

Over the last few years, researchers have found a shocking number of vulnerabilities in seemingly basic code that underpins how devices communicate with the Internet. Now, a new set of nine such vulnerabilities are exposing an estimated 100 million devices worldwide, including an array of Internet-of-things products and IT management servers. The larger question researchers are scrambling to answer, though, is how to spur substantive changes—and implement effective defenses—as more and more of these types of vulnerabilities pile up. Dubbed Name:Wreck, the newly disclosed flaws are in four ubiquitous TCP/IP stacks, code that integrates network communication protocols to establish connections between devices and the Internet. The vulnerabilities, present in operating systems like the open source project FreeBSD, as well as Nucleus NET from the industrial control firm Siemens, all relate to how these stacks implement the “Domain Name System” Internet phone book. They all would allow an attacker to either crash a device and take it offline or gain control of it remotely. Both of these attacks could potentially wreak havoc in a network, especially in critical infrastructure, health care, or manufacturing settings where infiltrating a connected device or IT server can disrupt a whole system or serve as a valuable jumping-off point for burrowing deeper into a victim's network. All of the vulnerabilities, discovered by researchers at the security firms Forescout and JSOF, now have patches available, but that doesn't necessarily translate to fixes in actual devices, which often run older software versions. Sometimes manufacturers haven't created mechanisms to update this code, but in other situations they don't manufacture the component it's running on and simply don't have control of the mechanism. “With all these findings, I know it can seem like we’re just bringing problems to the table, but we're really trying to raise awareness, work with the community, and figure out ways to address it,” says Elisa Costante, vice president of research at Forescout, which has done other, similar research through an effort it calls Project Memoria. “We've analyzed more than 15 TCP/IP stacks both proprietary and open source and we've found that there's no real difference in quality. But these commonalities are also helpful, because we've found they have similar weak spots. When we analyze a new stack, we can go and look at these same places and share those common problems with other researchers as well as developers.” The researchers haven't seen evidence yet that attackers are actively exploiting these types of vulnerabilities in the wild. But with hundreds of millions—perhaps billions—of devices potentially impacted across numerous different findings, the exposure is significant. Siemens USA chief cybersecurity officer Kurt John told Wired in a statement that the company “works closely with governments and industry partners to mitigate vulnerabilities … In this case we’re happy to have collaborated with one such partner, Forescout, to quickly identify and mitigate the vulnerability." The researchers coordinated disclosure of the flaws with developers releasing patches, the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and other vulnerability-tracking groups. Similar flaws found by Forescout and JSOF in other proprietary and open source TCP/IP stacks have already been found to expose hundreds of millions or even possibly billions of devices worldwide. Issues show up so often in these ubiquitous network protocols because they've largely been passed down untouched through decades as the technology around them evolves. Essentially, since it ain't broke, no one fixes it. “For better or worse, these devices have code in them that people wrote 20 years ago—with the security mentality of 20 years ago,” says Ang Cui, CEO of the IoT security firm Red Balloon Security. “And it works; it never failed. But once you connect that to the Internet, it’s insecure. And that’s not that surprising, given that we've had to really rethink how we do security for general-purpose computers over those 20 years.” The problem is notorious at this point, and it's one that the security industry hasn't been able to quash, because vulnerability-ridden zombie code always seems to reemerge. “There are lots of examples of unintentionally recreating these low-level network bugs from the '90s,” says Kenn White, co-director of the Open Crypto Audit Project. “A lot of it is about lack of economic incentives to really focus on the quality of this code.” There's some good news about the new slate of vulnerabilities the researchers found. Though the patches may not proliferate completely anytime soon, they are available. And other stopgap mitigations can reduce the exposure, namely keeping as many devices as possible from connecting directly to the Internet and using an internal DNS server to route data. Forescout's Costante also notes that exploitation activity would be fairly predictable, making it easier to detect attempts to take advantage of these flaws. Visit OUR FORUM to learn more.