Find out the week’s top mobile stories from around the world. Headlines this week include… FCC says it closed a loophole that many robocallers used to evade blocking, The EU introduces new crypto rules to protect against fraud and climate impact, ‘Supercookies’ Have Privacy Experts Sounding the Alarm and much more…
FCC says it closed a loophole that many robocallers used to evade blocking
Ars Technica
The Federal Communications Commission today said it closed a robocall loophole by requiring small phone companies to implement the caller ID authentication technology known as STIR and SHAKEN.
Large voice providers were required to implement STIR/SHAKEN a year ago. But there was an exemption for carriers with 100,000 or fewer customers that would have given those smaller companies until June 30, 2023, to comply.
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The EU introduces new crypto rules to protect against fraud and climate impact
Engadget
Europe and its member states have provisionally agreed on new crypto regulations that aim to protect consumers and service providers, the European Parliament announced. Called “MiCA” (markets in crypto-assets), it’s designed to guard against things like fraud, criminal activity, climate impact and more.
“In the Wild West of the crypto-world, MiCA will be a global standard setter,” said Germany’s MEP Stefan Berger in a statement. “MiCA will ensure a harmonised market, provide legal certainty for crypto-asset issuers, guarantee a level playing field for service providers and ensure high standards for consumer protection.”
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‘Supercookies’ Have Privacy Experts Sounding the Alarm
Wired
Customers of some phone companies in Germany, including Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom, have had a slightly different browsing experience from those on other providers since early April. Rather than seeing ads through regular third-party tracking cookies stored on devices, they’ve been part of a trial called TrustPid.
TrustPid allows mobile carriers to generate pseudo-anonymous tokens based on a user’s IP address that are administered by a company also named TrustPid. Each user is assigned a different token for each participating website they visit, and these can be used to provide personalized product recommendations—but in what TrustPid calls “a secure and privacy-friendly way.” It’s that “privacy-friendly” part that has raised critics’ hackles.
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Google sign-up ‘fast track to surveillance’, consumer groups say
BBC
Google is facing action from a coalition of ten European consumer organisations over the company’s account sign-up process.
A Google account is essential in order to use a number of its products and services.
But the coalition alleges the sign-up process steers users towards options that collect more data. Google told the BBC it welcomed the opportunity to engage with consumer advocates on the topic.
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OPINION: As smartphone use grows, users’ trust wanes
Reuters
The smartphone is more central to our lives than ever before, but users are growing ever more fearful. It seems almost counterintuitive: we trust our mobiles to deliver information, entertainment, and keep our secrets, but even as more people access services via their mobiles, we regard them with suspicion. The growing ease of mobile banking, ordering of food and cabs, and dating is offset by growing concerns about the risk of spam, fraud, and the lack of privacy.
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Customers outraged over failure of Bangkok Bank’s mobile app on pay day
Thai PBS World
Many netizens took to Twitter to complain about Bangkok Bank’s mobile application, which had been down “due to current high volume of access” since early this morning (Thursday), the day many people’s salaries are transferred into their accounts, making the hashtags, translated as “Bangkok is down” and “Bangkok Bank”, top trending on Twitter.
Many netizens ranted that the mobile app had been inaccessible since 5am. At the time of this report, the app remained inaccessible for many, with several complaining about not being able complete any transactions or even transfer money to their families.
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Is Mobile Gaming Becoming More Respected By The Wider Gaming Community?
Movies Games & Tech
The world of gaming is made up of many different types of people, all with varying interests and skill levels, so it’s no wonder that opinions differ greatly about the industry. Some people dedicate their entire lives to video games, and occasionally those people can be quite critical of the more casual fans who don’t share their level of reflexes or overall knowledge of the gaming industry. At the same time, some of those casual fans might be critical of those who easily sink around 10 hours or more each day playing video games. Usually, though, these criticisms are reserved for the minority on both sides; however, being such a popular entertainment industry, there are countless more criticisms that gamers have, and those can be shared by both “hardcore” and casual fans alike. One of these criticisms has been that of mobile gaming. But could that critical perception of mobile games be changing?
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Ericsson: 5G to top 570 million subscriptions in Southeast Asia and Oceania in 2027
Light Reading
5G subscriptions in Southeast Asia and Oceania are expected to more than double in 2022 from around 15 million at the end of 2021. The forecast is contained in the latest edition of the Ericsson (NASDAQ: ERIC) Mobility Report, which also predicts that current global 5G subscriptions will pass the one billion milestone by the end of 2022.
As more network deployments take place over the next few years, 5G mobile subscriptions in Southeast Asia and Oceania are expected to grow at a CAGR of 83 percent over the forecast period, reaching 570 million in 2027.
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How the pandemic accelerated use of anonymised location data from mobile phones
Business Matters
In early 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic struck, the Office for National Statistics’ Data Science Campus started working with private mobile phone companies to see how anonymised data could help answer some of the problems that society faced.
Dr Arthur Turrell, Acting Director of the ONS Data Science Campus, explains why using this data is important and how ‘faster data’ is becoming the norm.
COVID-19 changed so many aspects of our lives, introducing fundamental changes in how and why people move around—both locally and internationally.