A nationwide lawsuit accusing Google and Viacom of illegally tracking children under the age of 13 who visited the Nickelodeon website to watch videos and play videogames was dismissed Tuesday by U.S. District Judge Stanley Chesler in Newark, New Jersey. “Children do indeed warrant special attention and heightened protections under our laws,” said Chesler. But he said that there's no evidence that the children's privacy was violated by either company as established under the U.S. Video Privacy Protection Act, nor is there evidence that either company engaged in “highly offensive” behavior when it came to tracking the children for advertising purposes.

Facebook’s global economic impact was $227 billion in 2014, said a study released Tuesday by Deloitte. The social media company created 4.5 million jobs, it said. The study, which Deloitte prepared for Facebook, measured the company's effect on marketing services ($148 billion); platform and app development ($29 billion); and the demand for mobile devices and broadband services ($50 billion). The study’s findings focused on third parties affected by Facebook and excluded the revenue and jobs within the social media company. Facebook generated $100 billion in the U.S.; the European Union, $68 billion; the U.K., $11 billion; and Brazil, $10 billion, said Deloitte. It said the company’s activities created 1.07 million jobs in the U.S.; the EU, 1.13 million jobs; and 335,000 jobs in India.

Netflix has continued “to deliver a variety of algorithmic and data improvements that put better choices in front of members,” said CEO Reed Hastings and Chief Financial Officer David Wells Tuesday in a quarterly letter to shareholders. “We are also pioneering offering new high-quality video formats, delivering UHD-4K for House of Cards and Marco Polo.” Netflix soon will begin offering high dynamic range video, which “captures and renders pictures with more realistic peak brightness in the highlights, and may be a more significant step forward in viewing pleasure than UHD-4K,” they said. “We will start building our library to deliver in HDR as new TVs become available from several manufacturers this year.” At CES, Netflix said it would support the HDR technologies of Dolby Vision and the open HDR standards espoused by the new UHD Alliance (see 1501050023). On the issue of “strong net neutrality,” people around the world “increasingly view Internet access as a necessary utility,” the letter said. “Finland even made fast Internet access a legal right.” Recently, President Barack Obama “echoed the same themes in his call for the FCC to take bold steps to be able to ensure a low-cost high-speed Internet,” it said. “The support for strong net neutrality continues to grow.”

President Barack Obama said he supports U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron’s push for information and communications technology (ICT) companies to continue allowing government tracking of suspects and potential terrorists via their technology. “Social media and the Internet is the primary way in which these terrorist organizations are communicating,” Obama said during a news conference Friday. “When we have the ability to track that in a way that is legal … and presents oversight, then that’s a capability that we have to preserve.” Cameron and FBI Director James Comey have raised concerns about attempts by Apple, Google and other companies to encrypt customers’ data in a way that governments can’t access. Cameron pushed back Friday against claims that he’s seeking backdoors into companies’ technology, saying, “we’re asking for very clear front doors through legal processes to help keep our country safe.” Cameron and Obama agreed in bilateral meetings last week to strengthen existing cybersecurity cooperation between the U.K. and U.S. governments. The countries plan joint cybersecurity exercises targeted at testing specific industries’ defenses, with the first to focus on the financial sector, the White House said. The countries also will work to align existing cybersecurity best practices in the National Institute of Standards and Technology-led Cybersecurity Framework and the U.K.'s Cyber Essentials scheme, the White House said.

The BroadbandUSA initiative under the NTIA’s auspices uses the agency’s experience with the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) “and brings that skill set to share with communities around the country to help them with the issues they’re facing to ensure” they can improve their broadband access, Douglas Kinkoph, acting associate administrator of the Office of Telecommunications and Information Applications, said in an interview. The White House announced the BroadbandUSA initiative Wednesday as part of its package of plans to improve access to affordable high-speed broadband. President Barack Obama also declared his support for ending state laws that restrict municipal broadband deployments as part of that plan (see 1501140048). BroadbandUSA is “a continuation in some ways of NTIA’s mission of always pushing and helping in the broadband space, but we’re not funding this time,” Kinkoph said Thursday. “We’re providing expertise and sharing it on a no-cost basis.” New NTIA grants would have required legislation from Congress, and the White House emphasized that its new broadband plan would focus on initiatives that didn’t require Congress. NTIA’s BTOP experience means it has “expertise that cuts across infrastructure, broadband mapping, broadband adoption, digital inclusion and public access,” which can all be integrated into advice the agency can provide to local communities, said Laura Breeden, program director-public computing and broadband adoption.

The Worcester Polytechnic Institute was given $4.4 million by the National Science Foundation to address the “critical national shortage of highly trained experts in cybersecurity,” a WPI news release said Thursday. The program, funded by NSF’s CyberCorps: Scholarship for Service initiative, will provide scholarships to 25 undergraduate and graduate students who commit to government employment upon graduation, it said. Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., said in the release: “We have a critical need for additional experts in this field -- a need that the federal government can and should help to fill.”

The Department of Justice partnered with Microsoft's Bing to broaden the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's Amber Alert system's reach, DOJ said in a news release Tuesday. Facebook users will begin to see targeted Amber Alerts in their News Feeds, the company said earlier Tuesday (see 1501130030). DOJ said Bing will let users access alerts through its online tools.

The Internet Society’s Singapore Chapter was selected as the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority Coordination Group’s (ICG) secretariat contractor, ICANN said in a news release Tuesday. The chapter will coordinate meetings and communications for the ICG, it said.

Facebook users will soon see issued Amber Alerts on their News Feed, the company said in a news release Tuesday. The alerts, through a partnership with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, won’t trigger phone notifications. Facebook will send alerts to the News Feeds in Facebook users' search areas, a Facebook spokeswoman told us Tuesday. Amber Alerts on Facebook will include such information as a photograph of the missing child, a license plate number, the child’s name and descriptions of the child and the suspected abductor. Facebook users will be able to learn more about a specific alert or share it.

The Department of Justice asked the U.S. District Court in San Francisco to dismiss Twitter’s lawsuit against it for refusing the social media company’s request to release a redacted transparency report, according to court documents filed Friday. Twitter sued the FBI and Justice Department in October, asking the court to let it release the “actual scope of surveillance of Twitter users by the U.S. government,” a company blog post said (see 1410080057). “The additional material that Twitter seeks to publish is information that the Government has judged is properly protected classified national security information, the disclosure of which would risk serious harm to national security,” said DOJ's Friday filing. “The law is clear that the First Amendment does not permit such publication, and any restrictions imposed by statutory authority or judicial order on the publication of classified information are lawful under the First Amendment, both on their face and as they may have been applied to Twitter." Twitter didn’t comment. The case number is 14-cv-4480.