The National Enquirer’s parent company, AMI, tried to blackmail Jeff Bezos with naked they obtained, but Bezos isn’t playing:

Well, that got my attention. But not in the way they likely hoped. Any personal embarrassment AMI could cause me takes a back seat because there’s a much more important matter involved here. If in my position I can’t stand up to this kind of extortion, how many people can? (On that point, numerous people have contacted our investigation team about their similar experiences with AMI, and how they needed to capitulate because, for example, their livelihoods were at stake.)

In the AMI letters I’m making public, you will see the precise details of their extortionate proposal: They will publish the personal photos unless Gavin de Becker and I make the specific false public statement to the press that we “have no knowledge or basis for suggesting that AMI’s coverage was politically motivated or influenced by political forces.”

If we do not agree to affirmatively publicize that specific lie, they say they’ll publish the photos, and quickly. And there’s an associated threat: They’ll keep the photos on hand and publish them in the future if we ever deviate from that lie.

AMI is a scummy company that lacks morals. Who would have thought?

Related: The New York Post didn’t pass up the opportunity to publish a great headline.

Facebook exposed up to 6.8 million users’ private photos to developers in latest leak:

Facebook exposed private photos from up to 6.8 million users to apps that weren’t supposed to see them, the company said today. These apps were authorized to see a limited set of users’ photos, but a bug allowed them to see pictures they weren’t granted access to. These included photos from people’s stories as well as photos that people uploaded but never posted (because Facebook saved a copy anyway).

Who is (still) posting “private” photos to Facebook?

At this point I don’t have any sympathy for anyone on Facebook and anything that might happen to them. If you’re on Facebook and think your data is private you’re being willfully ignorant.

Full disclosure: Last year I deleted my Facebook account and then reactivated earlier this year in order to convert one of my Instagram accounts to a business account (Facebook requires you have a Business page connected to your Instagram business account). The personal data I’ve put on Facebook is the bare minimum and contains nothing sensitive or private. In short, I know what I’m getting into and I accept the risks.

Facebook Doesn’t Expect Revenue Impact Over Privacy Concerns:

Facebook Inc. doesn’t expect the recent uproar over its users’ digital privacy to affect sales significantly, a top advertising executive for the global social-media platform said.

Facebook users largely haven’t changed their privacy settings in the past four weeks amid heightened scrutiny over how it shares individual data, Facebook vice president of global marketing solutions Carolyn Everson said at The Wall Street Journal CEO Council in London.

“We have not seen wild changes in behavior with people saying I’m not going to share any data with Facebook anymore,” Ms. Everson said on Thursday.

Not surprising in the least.

Most people barely know how iCloud works and how to back up their photos. Now they’re going to go into the Facebook settings and reconfigure how their data is shared? That’s cute.

The GOP Just Killed Consumer Broadband Privacy Protections:

As most had expected, the House of Representatives today voted 215 to 205 to kill privacy rules protecting US broadband subscribers. If you’re interested in a little thing called public accountability, you can find a breakdown of which Representatives voted for the measure here. The rules, approved by the FCC last fall, were slated to take effect this month.

But thanks to relentless lobbying by the broadband and marketing industries, the GOP quickly rushed to dismantle the rules at ISP request. The effort involved using the Congressional Review Act, which only lets Congress kill recently passed regulations, but prevents the regulator in question from implementing the same regulations down the road.

The rules would have required that ISPs transparently disclose private data collection and sales, while requiring ISPs have consumers opt in to the collection of more private financial or browsing history data.

Today’s vote came after the Senate voted 50-48 last week to kille the rules. The vote to dismantle the rules is seen as one of the more brazen examples of pay-to-play politics in recent memory. It’s a massive win for giant ISPs; especially those like AT&T and Verizon that are pushing hard into the Millennial advertising business.

Alright, this is really bad, but I try to be an optimist. One of my design professors used to say, “The solution to the problem lies within the problem itself.”

So privacy rules are going away. Fine. This means we have to be vigilant and take matters into our own hands.

Although it was a very different situation, this reminds me of a lawsuit that occurred in the pre-iPhone 2006-07 period, banning the use of plugin technologies, like Flash, on the Internet. Eolas had brought forth the lawsuit against Microsoft and their Explorer web browser in relation to one of their patents. It sounded really bad for those of us who designed websites for a living but didn’t understand much about the technologies of the Web.

Then a developer I worked with named Geoff Stearns figured out a clever workaround to deploy Flash objects with Javascript. He wasn’t the only developer to figure this out. Like the light bulb, multiple people had figured out very similar solutions all around the same time. It actually made Flash sites more usable since it allowed for the HTML-only version of a page to display if the user didn’t have Flash. This meant that even after the lawsuit was dropped/settled, the web development community continued to use the Javascript workaround to build Flash sites.

I bring this story up to only to wonder if out of all the developers and software engineers responsible for helping create the Internet and keep it running, there are at least a few of them who have ideas on countering this privacy legislation.

Relaxing Privacy Vow, WhatsApp Will Share Some Data With Facebook:

When Facebook bought the start-up WhatsApp in 2014, Jan Koum, one of WhatsApp’s founders, declared that the deal would not affect the digital privacy of his mobile messaging service’s millions of users.

“We don’t know your birthday. We don’t know your home address,” Mr. Koum wrote in a blog post at the time. “None of that data has ever been collected and stored by WhatsApp, and we really have no plans to change that.”

Two years later, in a move that is rankling some of the company’s more than one billion users, WhatsApp will soon begin to share some member information with Facebook.

I am absolutely shocked. Shocked.

I’m sure all the millions of users will immediately cease use of the app.