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Democratic lawmaker Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.) is pushing the Labor Department to investigate the surveillance technology companies use to track their employees’ performance and productivity.
Meanwhile, we look at Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s comments to podcaster Joe Rogan this week about Facebook restricting stories related to a New York Post story after the FBI alert.
This is Hillicon Valley.From Capitol Hill to Silicon Valley, it details everything you need to know about tech and cyber news. Send tips to Hill’s Rebecca Clare and Ince Kagubare. Will someone send you this newsletter? Register here.
Senator urged Labor to pursue invasive technology
Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.), a member of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, is urging the Labor Department to monitor and regulate how companies use invasive technology to monitor their employees during work hours.
In a letter to Labor Secretary Marty Walsh, Casey called on the agency to provide greater oversight, accountability and transparency over how these surveillance technologies are used in the workplace and how they affect employee privacy.
- “The application of new technologies to monitor, control, manage and punish workers is growing because of the imbalance of power in the workplace and the lack of legal protections or regulatory restrictions,” Casey wrote in the letter.
- “Without monitoring, more and more intrusive technologies will be implemented in the workplace,” he said.
Casey listed examples of how workers are constantly monitored and sometimes punished or fired for low productivity scores, driven by algorithms and automated systems with “little or no meaningful human oversight.”
Read more here.
Zuckerberg on the Hunter Biden story
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told popular podcaster Joe Rogan this week that Facebook has restricted stories from the New York Post’s news feed after an FBI alert about President Biden’s son Hunter Biden and his laptop, but he sees the law enforcement agency as a “legitimate entity.”
- Zuckerberg said in an episode of Rogan’s podcast, “The Joe Rogan Experience,” that was uploaded on Thursday that the FBI contacted his company before the 2020 presidential election to warn them about potentially polarizing content.
- The warning comes after Russia’s use of social media platforms, including Facebook, before the 2016 election.
Zuckerberg said he took the warning seriously. While the social media platform doesn’t prevent people from sharing a post’s story, it does take steps to determine how often the story appears on feeds.
“None of this is new. As Mark stated in front of the Senate two years ago, Ahead of the 2020 election, the FBI has warned about the threat of foreign hacking and data loss. Meta tweeted on Thursday Zuckerberg’s comments have received widespread attention.
Read more here.
It says LASTPASS was hacked.
The CEO of password manager Laspast said Thursday that it had been hacked recently, but that the company had not seen any evidence that the incident exposed customer data or passwords.
“We have determined that an unauthorized party accessed the LastPass development environment with a compromised developer account and obtained some source code and some proprietary LastPass technical information,” CEO Karim Toubaba wrote in a letter to customers.
The software allows users to store passwords for different accounts and websites in a “vault” that can be unlocked with a single master password, and provides customers with auto-generated passwords designed to be difficult to guess.
Read more here.
Bits and pieces
Op-ed to chew on: China’s property market is on the brink. Here’s what it means for investors
Popular links from around the web:
Democrats are getting comfortable playing Republicans online (The Verge/Makena Kelly)
Apple growing possibility of DOJ antitrust suit (Politics/Josh Cisco)
Crypto companies say US sanctions will limit use of privacy software (The Associated Press/Fatima Hussain)
Greece, EU Accused of Investigating Spying Scandal in ‘Superficial’ Way (Bloomberg/Liubov Pronina and Sotiris Nikas)
📖 Simple clicking; Word of the day
One more thing: T-Mobile, SpaceX team together
T-Mobile is partnering with Elon Musk’s SpaceX to use the company’s Starlink satellites to provide mobile networks to mobile phone users in remote areas, both companies announced at an event on Thursday.
Musk and T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert of SpaceX Star Base in Boca Chica, Texas, said the launch will have a big impact on improving cell phone service in rural and hard-to-reach areas.
Before speaking, company officials watched a video of cell phone users concerned about the lack of cell phone reception in remote parts of the US. Call for help.
Read more here.
That’s it for today, thanks for reading. Check out the Hill’s Technology and Cyber ​​Security pages for the latest news and coverage. See you next week.
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