USHouseofRepresentatives
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House Republicans seek answers from Apple and Alphabet on privacy issues
In the wake of last week's Google scandal around third-party apps accessing user information, top Republican members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee sent letters to both Alphabet and Apple. The top Republican leaders asked Alphabet CEO Larry Page about the third-party access to user email, while checking in with Apple CEO Tim Cook about access third-party developers might have via the iTunes App Store. The leaders also inquired about the ability of smartphones to listen in on users, something both Mark Zuckerberg has denied and researchers haven't found any evidence of.
House passes bill that would call for a single website tracking federal spending
The last time a proposed law captured our attention it was so widely loathed it was never even put to a vote, but today we bring you the kind of no-brainer legislation that seems to have strong support on both sides of the aisle. The US House of Representatives has passed the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act (DATA), a bill that calls for the creation of an independent board to log all federal spending on a single, centralized website. What's more, these expenses need to be recorded with identifiers and markup languages that make them more easily searchable. As Computerworld notes, the vote happens to come on the heels of a recent dust-up involving the US General Services Administration spending $823,000 on a conference in Vegas -- precisely the sort of excess this proposed website would be designed to expose. The next step, of course, is for the bill to win Senate approval, though for now it seems the legislation has garnered strong bi-partisan support: in a rare showing, all of the lawmakers who discussed the DATA Act on the House floor argued in favor of it.
