The IT Nerd

Privacy is a “thing” at the moment and I guess that Verizon sees that and wants to cash in on this trend by creating a privacy focused search engine via their Verizon Media division:

Verizon Media, the media and digital offshoot of telecommunications giant Verizon, has launched a “privacy-focused” search engine called OneSearch. With OneSearch, Verizon promises there will be no cookie tracking, no ad personalization, no profiling, no data-storing, and no data-sharing with advertisers.

With its default dark mode, OneSearch lets you know that Advanced Privacy Mode is activated. You can manually toggle this mode to the “off” position which returns a brighter interface, but with this setting deactivated you won’t have access to privacy features such as search-term encryption. With Advanced Privacy Mode on, links to search results will only be shareable for an hour, after which time they will “self-destruct” and return an error to anyone who clicks on it. More broadly, the OneSearch interface is clean and fairly familiar to anyone who has used a search engine before. But at its core, it promises to show the same search results to everyone given that it’s not tailored to the individual.

I had a look at the OneSearch privacy policy and it says that Verizon will store a user’s IP address, search query, and user agent on different servers so that it can’t draw correlations between a user’s specific location and the query that they’ve made. Another point is that it also says that it will monetize its new search engine through advertising. But  the advertising won’t be based on browsing history or data that personally identifies the individual it will only serve contextual advertisements based on each individual search,

Call me cynical, but I can’t see how OneSearch can call itself privacy focused. DuckDuckGo doesn’t collect or store any of your information. That’s true privacy as far as I am concerned which is why I use it and not Google, Bing, or anything else. And it’s not what Verizon is doing with OneSearch as they are collecting your information, but simply storing it in different places which nobody on the planet can consider to be privacy focused. That alone makes me gunshy about ever using this search engine. But if you want to give it a try, OneSearch is currently available on desktop and mobile web, with mobile apps coming later this month.

The first-ever shareholder vote on child sexual exploitation online received a 34-percent vote at Verizon’s annual meeting today, estimated at representing more than $50 billion in stock.

Speaking at today’s annual meeting, the proposal’s lead filer Tracey Rembert, director of Catholic Responsible Investments at CBIS, had this to say about today’s vote:

“The innovations and technologies our company is rightly proud of, have also had the unintended consequence of making it easier to commit sexual crimes against children. Email accounts, digital advertising exchanges, wireless data, cloud storage, online user content — they all help facilitate child sexexploitation. And Verizon depends upon all of them for revenues.

“Child sex abuse material is a societal problem, but it is almost entirely manifesting and growing in the ICT sector. We believe that Verizon needs to demonstrate to investors that it is properly assessing the risk to children and itself from this growing threat.”

Michael Passoff, CEO of Proxy Impact and resolution co-filer, had this to say about today’s vote:

“As technology speeds up, our kid’s safety slows down. The digital playground is not always a safe place for kids. This is an exceptional vote for a first-year resolution, it’s clear that shareholders want Verizon to be a leader in making the world safer for our children.”

The resolution was filed by CBIS, Proxy Impact, the Maryknoll Sisters, the Benedictine Sisters of Virginia, and the Sisters of St. Dominic of Caldwell, New Jersey.

Understanding Shareholder Votes:

Shareholder resolutions are non-binding and consequently do not “win” or “lose” regardless of the vote. They do have to meet U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s vote thresholds to be eligible to be resubmitted the next year. These thresholds (based on total For vs. Against votes) are 3% support the first year, 6% the second year and 10% the third and following years. Shareholder resolutions were designed to be a formal communication channel with management and are best assessed as how they influence management. In this sense, even modest votes can have a significant impact based on their ability to educate management and other investors to the potential risk and opportunities related to the issue being raised.

On May 2, a group of investors are presenting the first shareholder resolution to come to a vote on the growing risk of child sex exploitation online at Verizon Communications’ annual meeting in Orlando, Florida. The filers, representing faith-based and high-net-worth investors with more than $27M in shares, are calling on the largest telecom in the U.S. to increase its efforts to protect children online from sexual abuse and grooming. The investors note in the proposal that parental controls have not been enough to protect child users, and that companies like Verizon are at the intersection of a spectrum of technologies that are putting children at increased risk. The largest proxy voting advisory firm in the world, Institutional Shareholder Services, recommends support for this proposal.

Verizon’s Tumblr was proven to be sharing child sex content last November, and was kicked off of Apple’s App Store because of it. The company has also faced significant fines in 2018 related to the illegal collection and selling of child user data.

The lead filer of the proposal, CBIS, is concerned by the flood of child sex imagery and conduct occurring online. The major hotline for reporting child sex abuse in the U.S. — the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children — has reported receiving more than 45 million child sex images and videos to its Cyber Tipline in 2018.

Along with CBIS and Proxy Impact, other co-filers of the proposal include the Maryknoll Sisters, the Benedictine Sisters of Virginia, and the Sisters of St. Dominic of Caldwell, New Jersey.

The U.S. Department of Justice reports that “mobile devices have fundamentally changed the way offenders can abuse children,” and “apps on these devices can be used to target, recruit or groom, and coerce children,” or to “stream video of child sexual abuse” in real-time. INTERPOL notes that only 4,000 unique child sex images were circulating in 1995. Today, the UN Office of Drugs and Crime estimates at least 50,000 new images hitting the web each year.