In this Issue:

• Bezos cries personal privacy foul while Amazon builds surveillance state
• On Amazon’s practice of knocking off everybody, including their own clients
• Google’s Nest Secure units contain an undocumented microphone        
• Canadian crypto-exchange bankrupt, freezing 180 million in customer assets
• German anti-trust regulator bans Facebook’s entire business model
• The DNS Privacy Debate 
• Reddit users revolt over Tencent investment
• Tim O’Reilly on the tech unicorn economy
• easyMail users: please check your mail client settings

Bezos cries personal privacy foul while Amazon builds surveillance state

In this Intercept article Glenn Greenwald, the same reporter who broke the Ed Snowden revelations that the NSA spies on everybody, all the time, muses on how Jeff Bezos can be upset about having his privacy being violated on one hand, whilst his company, Amazon, is a key partner in providing the technology platform for the  surveillance state. (Amazon’s AWS cloud computing platform is responsible for nearly a quarter of Amazon’s profits, and two of its largest customers are the Pentagon and the NSA.)

This is all part of the new “surveillance-as-a-service” boom which also includes, according to Far East based policy analyst David Dodwell, Facebook and Google, that is “concentrating corporate power and destroying privacy”.

Read: https://www.scmp.com/business/article/2185584/how-silicon-valleys-surveillance-capitalism-enriching-its-leaders-and

On Amazon’s practice of knocking off everybody, including their own clients

Not only does Amazon actively monetize ubiquitous surveillance, they also tend to cannibalize market verticals by leveraging their quasi-monopoly in online retailing to crowd out innovation, according to this piece in Forbes, which examines the various anti-trust issues. The argument is made that Amazon’s behaviour is anti-competitive, not because it directly hurts consumers, but because it distorts the incentives to innovate, which would hurt consumers as a second-order effect.

For example: when a retailer finds itself having a successful product and sells that product via Amazon, Amazon then uses the data generated and then frequently rolls out its own version of the same product at a lower price – squeezing the original retailer off of the platform. Amazon has over 200 brands launched within the last 2 years to compete in various verticals across its own platform.

Google’s Nest Guard units contain an undocumented microphone

Surprise! Turns out there’s an undocumented microphone in Google’s network connected Nest Guard base stations. Android Authority broke the story that Google’s announcement that it was rolling out Assistant functionality to all Nest Secure systems meant that there had to be an undocumented microphone somewhere in the already deployed devices.

Android Authority then updated their column with a statement from Google that confirmed their conclusion: all Nest Guard base stations would be able to operate as a pseudo-Google Home device after an opt-in software update, and that there is a microphone present in the units that is not documented in the official tech specs.

Canadian crypto-exchange bankrupt, freezing 180 million in customer assets

A lot of you have been asking me about my thoughts on this one, the story of the untimely death of QuadrigaCX Gerrald Cotten in India and the consequences of that are the stuff of Hollywood movies. Do I think the entire thing is a spectacular heist? Or did Canada’s largest crypto-currency exchange really allow their CEO’s personal laptop, which is encrypted, to be a Single-Point-Of-Failure for the entire organization and all its depositors? I really don’t know.

(We had some minimal exposure to QuadrigaCX on two fronts: we had a bit of cash in there that we used as a float when paying for services in Bitcoin like our LetsTalkBitcoin sponsorship. More of a loss, QuadrigaCX was the largest beta-test client of our new security platform which they used to detect phishing sites in near real time. If you run a website that is susceptible to phishing attacks and want some relief on that, feel free to drop me a line).