Japan will tighten regulations to prevent technology giants including Google and Facebook from abusing their market power and having unfair advantage over smaller businesses and competitors along with offering greater protection of personal data, officials said on Tuesday.
The new law would oblige tech giants, including Google LLC, Apple Inc , Facebook Inc and Amazon.com Inc to disclose the terms of contracts with customers and to report to the government about their operations, they said.
Google and Facebook have opposed tighter regulation, while traditional media owners, including Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, have backed reform.
For protection of personal data, the government will revise the personal information protection law to allow individuals to request digital firms to suspend the use of their data. The law currently regulates the handling of data collected by illicit means.
MacDailyNews Take: It’s amazing that privacy champion Apple continually gets lumped in with the likes of privacy-trampling Google and Facebook. It’s also illustrative of Apple’s failure to get their privacy message out to the great unwashed.
Apple needs to continue to relentlessly point out how FaceBook and Google make their money: By vacuuming up your personal data and selling it to the highest bidder. – MacDailyNews, June 5, 2017
Apple should be running a massive ad campaign that clearly explains how they stand apart from virtually every other major Silicon Valley company when it come to privacy and monetizing users. Every time there is a breach or an abuse at Facebook, Google, etc. Apple should be ready to pound their privacy message into the general public’s exceedingly thick collective skull. — MacDailyNews, April 10, 2018
It’s not at all apparent that the general public values their privacy enough or even knows that Apple’s privacy is paramount, but the average Joe/Jane does seem to regard Siri as not too bright, putting into question whether Apple’s commitment to privacy will every really pay off; i.e. translate to increased product sales.
Apple product users seem to value their privacy. Non-Apple product users, by definition, do not value their privacy (or they’d be Apple product users).
So, what’s the inflection point? Do Google and the others need to have an Equifax event befall it for their product users to wake up? Would they even wake up if Google etc. did have a cataclysmic breach? We have our doubts. — MacDailyNews, October 5, 2017
Until we see everyday people wake up about privacy, we’ll continue to believe that Apple is serving a niche market of those relative few who recognize the need for and desire the type of stringent privacy protections that Apple offers (outside of China). — MacDailyNews, March 21, 2018
It’s not just privacy, but contracts in the app store, book store, music store, film store, that they want to see, because some companies like Pandora have been complaining about big bad Apple making it hard for them to make money off the artists.