Google’s Web form to submit revenge porn removal requests is now available. The announcement of the form's availability came quietly last week in a one-sentence update added to the end of Google’s initial announcement last month that it would remove revenge porn from search results (see 1506190048). In addition to revenge porn, Google will remove other sensitive personal information, like bank account numbers or an image of a handwritten signature from search results, the form said. Federal legislation banning revenge porn may be introduced next week (see 1507140063).

Whenever Christos Catsouras searches his last name on Google, photos of his deceased daughter Nikki’s body and the wrecked car she was in during a fatal accident in 2006 surface, Catsouras said during a Consumer Watchdog-hosted news conference in Santa Monica, California, Wednesday. Having "the right to be forgotten" apply in the U.S. would be “the most amazing thing for our family and many other families out there,” Catsouras said. Photos of Nikki’s body were leaked by the California Highway Patrol and Catsouras said some individuals attach the photos and send them to him in emails. There is “absolutely no justification for these links to continue to exist,” said Consumer Watchdog Privacy Project Director John Simpson. Removing photos or links from search engine results isn't censorship because the content still exists and such removal is possible for a company to do because Google is honoring removal requests in Europe, Simpson said. In June, Google announced it would remove revenge porn from its search results, Simpson said. “To me, some of the photos that are haunting the Catsouras family are just as abusive and harmful [as revenge porn] and I don’t understand why Google won’t remove those links,” Simpson said. Consumer Watchdog initially contacted Google asking the company to honor right to be forgotten requests in the U.S., but Simpson said Google never responded. Bing and Yahoo should also honor removal requests, Simpson said, explaining Consumer Watchdog has focused on Google because “they are the big dog” and Google more than any other search engine or company describes itself as privacy friendly. Consumer Watchdog filed a complaint with the FTC against Google last week alleging that Google’s refusal to offer Americans the right to be forgotten privacy tool that Europeans have is an unfair and deceptive practice -- a violation of Section 5 of the FTC Act (see 1507070023). Simpson said the FTC has confirmed receipt of the complaint and is considering it, which Simpson said he took to be a positive sign. Simpson added that Consumer Watchdog would drop the complaint if Google did what was right and honored removal requests. Simpson said search engines are the first step, but as society figures out what are appropriate privacy protections in the digital age, additional policy changes may be necessary. Google had no immediate comment.

The FTC Consumer Protection Bureau “confirmed the FTC is considering Consumer Watchdog’s complaint” last week (see 1507070023) that Google’s failure to honor right to be forgotten requests in the United States is an “unfair and deceptive practice,” Consumer Watchdog said in a news release Tuesday. Consumer Watchdog will be joined tomorrow in Santa Monica, California at an event advocating for right to be forgotten requests to be honored in the U.S.by Christos Catsouras, the father of an 18-year-old California woman whose name “remains linked in Internet search results to graphic leaked police photos of her fatal car crash,” CW said. "Since the leak my family has been forced to relive the shock every time the horrific images reappear simply because there are no tools in place to stop it,” Catsouras said. “‘The Right To Be Forgotten' is the only chance for my family to find closure, and to finally grieve." Google and the FTC had no immediate comment.

Adobe released a security update to address “critical vulnerabilities” in Shockwave Player for Macintosh and Windows Tuesday, said an alert from the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team. U.S.-CERT said in a separate alert that Adobe also released security updates addressing vulnerabilities within the classes of Flash Player that could allow a “remote attacker to execute arbitrary code on a vulnerable system." Affected versions of Adobe include Adobe Flash Player 9 through 18.0.0.204.

Match and OkCupid operator Match Group said Tuesday that it agreed to buy online dating service PlentyOfFish for $575 million cash. “As more people than ever use more dating apps than ever with more frequency than ever, PlentyOfFish's addition both brings new members into our family of products and deepens the lifetime relationship we have with our users across our portfolio,” Match Group CEO Sam Yagan said in a news release. Match Group’s purchase of PlentyOfFish would add an additional 3 million unique users for Match Group-owned products. Match Group parent company IAC’s brands get traffic from more than 370 million users across more than 150 brands, IAC said. The purchase is expected to close in Q4 subject to regulatory approval by Canada’s minister of industry, Match Group said.

The proposed FTC settlement with consumer analytics company Nomi Technologies (see 1504230036) “deserves attention not merely as an isolated instance of regulatory overreach, but as emblematic of an enforcement policy that has become unmoored from the concept of consumer harm,” wrote James Cooper, director-research and policy at the George Mason School of Law's Law and Economics Center, in an opinion piece on The Hill’s website Monday. Cooper, who was an adviser to then-FTC Commissioner William Kovacic and acting director of the Office of Policy Planning, wrote that by enforcing the FTC Act “against trivial misstatements in privacy policies that nobody reads, the Commission has been able to put an increasingly large number of firms in the digital economy under 20-year orders.” These orders “often mandate intrusive monitoring and reporting” and allow the FTC to “obtain substantial monetary penalties for order violations -- just ask Google, which was hit with a $22.5 million fine for a misstatement on its FAQ page about how to disable cookies in Safari (which by all indications impacted nobody),” Cooper wrote. “Not only do these actions threaten to chill innovation in the digital economy, they will -- to quote Commissioner Joshua Wright’s dissent -- deter firms from ‘engaging in voluntary practices that promote consumer choice and transparency -- the very principles that lie at the heart of the Commission’s consumer protection mission,’” Cooper said. Wright tweeted a link to the post.

The American Booksellers Association (ABA) and a trio of authors’ advocacy groups urged the DoJ Antitrust Division Monday to investigate Amazon on antitrust grounds, saying in separate letters that the online retailer is abusing its position within the industry. Authors United urged DoJ to launch an investigation of Amazon’s “abuse of its dominance in the world of books,” claiming that Amazon has negatively impacted the U.S. book industry. The ABA sent a separate letter to DoJ in support of the Authors United letter, and said in a news release that the antitrust investigation request also has support from the Authors Guild and the Association of Authors’ Representatives. The Authors Guild said it plans to also send a letter to the DoJ. Amazon didn’t comment.

A new Florida Bar professional ethics committee opinion would allow lawyers to take pre-emptive steps to avoid a client’s past social media posts, photos or videos from being dragged into litigation, chair of Bilzin Sumberg’s Litigation Group's Michael Kreitzer and associate Naomi Alzate wrote in an article for the National Law Review posted Saturday. The opinion comes after an unnamed bar member inquired about the ethical obligations an attorney has when advising clients to “clean up” social media accounts to “eliminate embarrassing information the attorney considers immaterial to the suit,” they said. The lawyer also asked if a client can change his or her social media settings from “public” to “private.” If asked directly, attorneys must “comply with The Florida Bar’s Rule 4-3.4(a), which sets prohibitions on obstructing, destroying, altering or concealing material information the lawyer knows or reasonably should know is relevant to a pending or reasonably foreseeable proceeding,” the article said. The Florida Bar's proposed rule is similar to the New York County Lawyers' Association’s conclusion that “a lawyer may advise his/her clients to use the highest level of privacy settings on their social media pages and may advise clients to remove information from social media pages unless the lawyer has a duty to preserve information under law and there is no violation of law relating to spoliation of evidence,” Kreitzer and Alzate said. The opinion will become final within the next 30 days absent further action by the Florida Bar Board of Governors, they said.

The White House highlighted its 2015 cybersecurity efforts Thursday, saying its pace on addressing those issues will continue to increase “as the cyber threat continues to increase in severity and sophistication.” The White House’s retrospective went public amid its joint disclosure with the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) that the OPM data breach revealed in June affected an additional 21.5 million people beyond initial estimates (see 1507090049). The White House said its 2015 cybersecurity efforts include President Barack Obama’s Feb. 13 executive order to encourage cyberthreat information sharing (see 1502130048) and his April 1 executive order authorizing the attorney general and the secretaries of State and Treasury to impose sanctions on foreign-based entities launching cyberattacks against U.S. networks (see 1504010057). More recently, U.S. Chief Information Officer Tony Scott launched a 30-day “Cybersecurity Sprint” in June, ordering federal agencies to review and improve their cybersecurity policies (see 1506150071), the White House said. The Obama administration has also reached cybersecurity-related agreements with Brazil, India, Japan, the U.K. and the Gulf Cooperation Council, the White House said. “Since cybersecurity is about managing risk throughout the entire enterprise over the long-term, not through isolated, one-off actions, the Administration will continue to build on these efforts in the future,” the White House said. Meanwhile, the Department of Commerce said Thursday that the Internet Policy Task Force’s (IPTF) first cybersecurity multistakeholder process will focus on vulnerability research disclosure. The IPTF had been collecting input from industry stakeholders on potential cybersecurity topics it should explore (see 1506010055). The process, which NTIA is set to convene in September, is meant to create common principle and best practices related to security vulnerability information disclosures, said Deputy Assistant Commerce Secretary-Communications and Information Angela Simpson in a blog post. Commerce is urging security researchers, software vendors and other industry stakeholders “interested in a more secure digital ecosystem” to participate in the multistakeholder process, Simpson said.

NTIA will convene the next meeting of the facial recognition multistakeholder process July 28 in the boardroom at the American Institute of Architects, 1735 New York Ave. NW, said John Verdi, NTIA director-privacy initiatives, in an email to stakeholders Friday. The meeting will be webcast and a dial-in number will be provided, he said. “The stakeholder working group is collaborating to make progress on issues discussed at the June meeting, including: user consent, anti-fraud uses of facial recognition technology, and perhaps a few related topics,” he said: “The working group’s goal is to generate a proposal (or proposals) for review by the full group prior to the July 28 meeting.”