The New Jersey Office of Attorney General dropped its investigation of Tidbit, said a consent order filed Tuesday in Essex County Superior Court in New Jersey. Tidbit was a project of four Massachusetts Institute of Technology students who developed the software for a hackathon in November 2013. The software was envisioned as a substitute for website advertisements, allowing sites to instead monetize visits by using visitors’ computers to mine for bitcoins. Tidbit’s developer is prohibited from accessing or attempting to access New Jerseyans’ computers without clearly and conspicuously notifying the owners and obtaining their verifiable consent, the order said. The consent order also includes a $25,000 settlement that will be suspended and automatically vacated within two years, provided the software developer complies with the settlement terms. “We do not believe Tidbit was created for the purpose of invading privacy,” said Division of Consumer Affairs Acting Director Steve Lee in a news release. “However, this potentially invasive software raised significant questions about user privacy and the ability to gain access to and potentially damage privately owned computers without the owners’ knowledge and consent. As privacy threats become more and more sophisticated, State law requires us to protect the interests and safety of New Jersey consumers.”

Reps. Luke Messer, R-Ind., and Jared Polis, D-Colo., will speak at a Center for Democracy & Technology hosted event on Tuesday on privacy issues for data collected by education technologies, CDT said in a news release Thursday. “Technology in education has the potential to revolutionize learning,” the release said, but the “adoption of new technology requires consumer trust,” it said. More than 170 state student privacy bills have been introduced in 2015, the White House announced its student privacy legislative proposal in January, and now Congress is considering multiple student privacy bills, it said. Following Messer and Polis’ speeches, CDT President Nuala O’Connor will moderate a panel on student privacy; panelists are White House Policy Adviser for the Office of the Chief Technology Officer Dipayan Ghosh, Data Quality Campaign CEO Aimee Guidera, Public Policy Lead for Google's strategy and programs on youth and technology Sarah Holland, Director of Education Policy and Programs at Microsoft Allyson Knox, and Vice President-Policy at Common Sense Media Joni Lupovitz.

The Open Interconnect Consortium added 25 member organizations from around the world in sectors ranging from energy and engineering to gaming and education, a news release said Wednesday. New organizations include the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, Honeywell International, MIT-Kerberos & Internet Trust Consortium and the Telecommunications Technology Association. OIC also established liaison agreements with the Digital Living Network Alliance and UPnP Forum to “maintain compatibility and ensure common usages are covered,” the release said. “The addition of these organizations expands our scope well beyond consumer electronics and the smart home, all while accelerating toward our goal -- interoperability for connected solutions worldwide,” said Executive Director Mike Richmond, newly named executive director (see separate report below in this issue).

More than a quarter of tablet owners use their tablets less frequently than they thought they would after the initial purchase, an ecoATM survey found. Noting that tablet shipments “have been on a steady decline,” and that the volume of tablets traded in through ecoATM doubled in Q1 from the same quarter a year ago, the supplier of e-waste recycling kiosks set out to determine whether those trends reflected a diminishing consumer appetite for tablets, the company said in a Wednesday announcement. It commissioned a study in which 1,175 U.S. tablet owners were canvassed earlier this month on their tablet usage habits, it said. It found that about 26 percent said they use their tablets an average of less than three hours a week, and 8 percent said they no longer use them at all, it said. The findings suggested that lack of “utility” might well be the main reason why the novelty of tablet usage has waned, it said. For example, a clear majority (60 percent) of those canvassed indicated they prefer using a laptop instead of a tablet, while 26 percent said their smartphones gives them all the functionality they need, it said.

TechFreedom and the International Center for Law & Economics (ICLE) filed joint comments Tuesday on the FTC’s upcoming workshop on the Sharing Economy, in which the groups urged the FTC to establish a permanent advocacy program to serve as a counterweight to “entrenched incumbents who typically seek local and state government policies that prevent their markets from being disrupted by ‘sharing economy’ services.” The FTC spends a tiny fraction of its budget on competition advocacy, TechFreedom President Berin Szoka said. "For years, Uber, Lyft, and other sharing-economy companies have been grappling with regulators doing the bidding of established industries,” Szoka said, while the FTC has “been asleep at the wheel -- too busy harassing tech companies over their use of customer data." The FTC needs to make advocacy an institutional priority and become more proactive, Szoka said. “The FTC should resist the tendency to regulate Uber, AirBnB and other sharing economy companies the same way it's regulated privacy and data security -- by bringing major players under consent decrees that force the companies to start vetting product innovations with the FTC,” ICLE Associate Director Ben Sperry said. “Forcing innovators to 'play it safe' will sap the disruptive spirit that has made these companies so successful,” he said. Free State Foundation President Randolph May, Senior Fellow Seth Cooper and Research Associate Michael Horney submitted comments to the FTC Tuesday, in which they encouraged the agency to focus on enhancing overall consumer welfare and consumer satisfaction. The success of the sharing economy is due to creative risk-taking, the comments said. “Sharing economy services and related applications must remain free to form and operate without the strictures of any new sector-specific regulations or older regulations designed for incumbent providers of legacy services,” they said. “The proper way to respond to ‘level the playing field’ between sharing economy entrants and incumbent service providers is to remove unnecessary regulations wherever they apply, not expand them in a competitive market environment.” Health, safety and consumer protection laws and regulations can be enforced so long as they are not formulated and implemented in a discriminatory fashion, they said. “Opponents of new sharing economy business models and disruptive new Internet applications should not be allowed to succeed in misusing laws and regulations in order to stifle the services merely because they perceive adverse impact on preexisting businesses.”

The Department of Homeland Security Office of Operations Coordination and Planning (OPS) is accepting comments until June 26 on its proposed changes to update and reissue its Publicly Available Social Media Monitoring and Situational Awareness Initiative system of records document, a notice in the Federal Register said Wednesday. OPS is updating this Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) to address the privacy impact of using geospatial information offered by mobile media to enhance situational awareness, the update said. OPS and the National Operations Center (NOC) monitor publicly available online forums, blogs, public websites, Twitter and message boards to collect information to “provide situational awareness and establish a common operating picture,” DHS said. DHS’ Privacy Office said OPS/NOC uses GPS and geographic location features offered through social media and mobile applications to enhance its search and reporting capabilities. “With the widespread use of online services and applications on mobile devices that are equipped with GPS, OPS is updating the Initiative PIA to address the privacy impact of the availability of geospatial functions within mobile media to enhance DHS situational awareness,” DHS said. Depending on the size of a search radius, OPS/NOC or the Media Monitoring Center (MMC) may inadvertently collect personally identifiable information, DHS said. To mitigate the risk OPS/NOC will redact PII if “collected inappropriately,” but DHS said the groups monitor only public sites where users post information voluntarily.

Consumer confidence toward the overall economy and technology spending both fell slightly in May, CEA said in a Tuesday announcement. CEA’s Index of Consumer Expectations, which measures consumer sentiment about the U.S. economy as a whole, decreased 2.4 points from April to 173.7, reflecting “mounting apprehension around the economy,” said Shawn DuBravac, CEA chief economist, in a statement. CEA’s Index of Consumer Technology Expectations, which measures consumer expectations about technology spending fell 2.1 points to 86.6.

Scams related to social media have increased “substantially” in the past five years, said the FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center’s (IC3) Internet crime report for 2014. An average of 22,000 complaints were reported each month, with total losses costing victims $800.5 million, it said Friday. Men and women were targeted almost equally. Those aged 40-59 were the most targeted age group, followed by 20-39-year-olds. The U.S. was the No. 1 targeted country, followed by Canada and the U.K. California had the most victim complaints followed by Florida and Texas. The report found 12 percent of all complaints submitted in 2014 had a social media aspect. “In most cases, victim’s personal information was exploited through compromised accounts or social engineering,” said IC3. Social media scams included: doxing, publicly releasing a person’s identifying information about themselves, family and friends; click-jacking, concealing hyperlinks beneath legitimate clickable content that causes a user to unknowingly download malware or send personal information to a website; and pharming, redirecting users from legitimate websites to fraudulent ones to extract confidential data, the report said. The second popular trend IC3 found in 2014 was related to vulnerabilities of the digital currency systems. Criminals bilked millions of dollars from those who use cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Litecoin and Peercoin, the report said. Other frequently reported Internet crimes in 2014 included auto fraud, government impersonation email scams, intimidation and extortion scams, real estate fraud, confidence fraud and romance scams, and business email compromises, it said.

The Department of Justice issued agencywide policy guidance on the department's use of unmanned aircraft systems last week to set standards of use and management controls, a DOJ news release said Friday. Law enforcement agencies sometimes use UAS or drones as “cost-effective, efficient and potentially life-saving tools to support public safety efforts,” said Justice. The new DOJ policy “highlights protections of privacy, civil rights and liberties and makes clear that UAS use must be consistent with the protections afforded by the U.S. Constitution,” said the department. DOJ components can’t use UAS solely to monitor activities protected by the First Amendment and can use UAS only for properly authorized investigations and activities, it said. “The collection, retention and dissemination of information collected by UAS is also subject to Privacy Act protections.” Persons operating UAS must be appropriately trained and supervised according to the department’s policies and annual privacy reviews will be conducted, DOJ said. The guidance issued was the result of discussions and research. DOJ said it will continue holding meetings at least twice per year to “ensure the department strikes the appropriate balance between its law enforcement and national security missions and respect for civil rights and civil liberties.”

Though most consumers own a mobile device they can use to take notes, “60 to 65 percent of us still prefer pen and paper, and 20 percent type with a keyboard,” Gilles Bouchard, CEO of the paper-based computing platform Livescribe, told us in a London briefing. “So let’s not fight, let’s join them.” Bouchard was previewing a new app that lets owners of smartphones and tablets with Android 4.4.2 or newer use them with the latest Livescribe 3 capture pen. Previously, the pen worked only with iOS devices. The smart pen captures text as it is handwritten in a Livescribe paper notebook, while Livescribe’s Android app stores a synchronized sound recording of anything being said at the same time on the Android device. So students, for example, can jot lecture notes while recording the lecturer. The text is displayed on the device’s screen and tapping on a written word triggers playback of whatever was being said as the note was written. Unlike the original Livescribe Echo and Pulse pens, the Livescribe 3 smart pen has no on-board screen, mic or speaker for audio capture and play. That functionality is now handled by the Android device. The pen uses a Bluetooth Smart data link to connect to multiple devices, and can deliver up to 14 hours of continuous writing on one charge. Recognizable words are digitized in the Android device for searching and saving. Users can also share notes and recordings as PDFs that play on other mobile devices or computers. The Livescribe 3 smart pen has a USB socket for charging only, not data transfer as in the previous pens. Bouchard demonstrated the system with a Nexus 9 tablet and it worked well. We then tried the pen with a new upmarket Huawei P8 smartphone and also with the low-cost Hudl 2 tablet heavily promoted in the U.K. by Tesco. The system was easy to set up and use with the P8, but we couldn't get it to work with the Hudl. Livescribe said it’s investigating why.