A fragmented personal tracking market “with no obvious sales and distribution channels” is causing a shift away from traditional family and pet locator devices, said an ABI report Wednesday. GPS personal tracking device shipments will more than double by 2021 as the market moves instead to elderly/health, corporate and personal asset tracking devices using indoor and outdoor location technology, it said. Although traditional markets “still attract attention,” they’re “being forced to consider new areas to find future growth,” said analyst Patrick Connolly, citing the elderly, dementia patients and remote patient monitoring as target segments. ABI predicts location-based health devices will top 2 million shipments by 2021. Shipments of corporate, industrial and personal asset tracking devices are expected to top 25 million by 2021, said Connolly, led by Bluetooth Low Energy beacons, UWB (ultra wideband), sensor fusion, magnet field, proprietary Wi-Fi and LPWAN (low-power wide area networks).

Citing the damage data breaches could inflict on businesses and consumers, FTC Commissioner Maureen Ohlhausen told participants Wednesday at the commission's Start with Security forum in Chicago that it's important to integrate security practices into a company. “So whether you’re building an app or managing your network or choosing your vendors, sound security practices are not an accident," she said. "They begin with a commitment to prioritize security within a business’s culture." Data breaches, she said, can harm a company's financial interests and reputation and result in a loss of consumer confidence. Consumers whose data is stolen can become victims of fraud and identity theft, she said. For instance, 16.6 million people -- U.S. residents 16 years and older -- were victims of identity theft in 2012, mainly credit card fraud, said Ohlhausen, citing the Bureau of Justice Statistics. She also cited the FTC's enforcement approach in making sure that companies have reasonable security practices and protections, and recent actions against AsusTeK Computer, Henry Schein Practice Solutions and Oracle (see 1602230032, 1605230030 and 1603290046). The Chicago workshop, with several panels of security experts providing insights and practical tips for the broader business community, is the fourth over the past year, including stops in Austin, San Francisco and Seattle.

Edge providers like YouTube and Facebook should be a little concerned about parts of the U. S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit decision upholding the FCC net neutrality order (see 1606140023), emailed Anna-Maria Kovacs, visiting senior policy scholar at the Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy. “The logic used by the FCC and upheld by the court has opened the door to subjecting any Internet platform to Title II” of the Communications Act, she wrote Tuesday. “That cannot bode well for those many edge providers that were temporarily exempted by the FCC but can easily be reached once it decides to extend its regulations to them.” The court upheld the FCC decision to reclassify mobile broadband as a common-carrier service, Kovacs said. “The same logic that enabled the FCC to reclassify mobile broadband applies to many edge providers,” she said. “Given the FCC’s arguments and the court’s acceptance of them, can any of the Internet platforms that have myriad users and massive revenues and can potentially be reached by any or all IP endpoints escape classification as telecommunications services? By the FCC’s and court’s logic, how can platforms like Facebook, FaceTime, Vonage, Skype, YouTube, Gmail, or even Uber be anything other than telecommunications services?”

The FTC and FCC are among 11 regulatory agencies from eight nations that recently signed a memorandum of understanding to share information and intelligence about unsolicited messages and calls that mainly deal with fraudulent and malicious activities, the FTC said in a Tuesday news release. The other signatories -- which are all part of the London Action Plan, a global network of public agencies and private sector representatives that fight spam and unsolicited calls -- come from Australia, Canada, Korea, the Netherlands, New Zealand and the U.K. In the release, the FTC and Florida attorney general's office also said the U.S. District Court in Orlando issued a temporary restraining order against several defendants, collectively known as Life Management Services of Orange County, preventing them from making illegal robocalls. The agencies said the defendants have bilked consumers out of more than $15.6 million since at least January 2013. The operation also will be prevented from selling bogus credit-card interest rate reduction and debt relief services pending an upcoming hearing, said the commission, which voted 3-0 to issue the complaint. The court unsealed the temporary restraining order Monday, four days after it was granted, the release said. Defendants claimed they would work with consumers' credit card companies or banks to reduce credit card interest rates, allowing consumers to pay off balances "three- to five-times faster," but consumers first had to pony up between $500 to $5,000 to Life Management Services, the release said. While the defendants sometimes tried to contact credit card companies, they "were almost never able to obtain the promised rates or savings," the agencies said. The defendants also promised consumers they could eliminate credit card debt by accessing a government fund -- which doesn't exist -- but required consumers to pay $2,500 to $20,000 up front, the release said. We got no reply to a message seeking comment that was left through a phone number that the Central Florida Better Business Bureau's website associated with Life Management.

Symantec agreed to buy web security company Blue Coat for $4.65 billion in cash, it said Monday. Blue Coat CEO Greg Clark will be named CEO of Symantec after the close of the deal in Q3, succeeding Ajei Gopal, interim chief operating officer, it said. The combined operations will offer security solutions across hundreds of millions of endpoints and servers and billions of email and web transactions, said Symantec. The combined company will help enterprises secure their cloud offerings and consolidate R&D efforts, bringing together more than 3,000 engineers and researchers and nine threat response centers, it said.

Unit shipments of artificial intelligence systems used in car infotainment systems and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), including autonomous vehicles, are expected to rise from just 7 million in 2015 to 122 million by 2025, IHS said in a Monday report. The “attach rate” of AI-based systems in new vehicles was 8 percent in 2015, and “the vast majority were focused on speech recognition,” IHS said. “That number is forecast to rise to 109 percent in 2025, as there will be multiple AI systems of various types installed in many cars.” AI-based systems in automotive applications today are “relatively rare, but they will grow to become standard in new vehicles over the next five years,” IHS said. It sees the biggest growth in infotainment “human-machine interface” uses, such as speech and gesture recognition, eye tracking and driver monitoring, and ADAS and autonomous vehicles, including camera-based machine vision systems, radar-based detection units, driver condition evaluation, and sensor fusion engine control units, it said. In ADAS, “deep learning” functions that mimic “human neural networks,” will represent “a key milestone on the road to fully autonomous vehicles,” it said. “Deep learning allows detection and recognition of multiple objects, improves perception, reduces power consumption, supports object classification, enables recognition and prediction of actions, and will reduce development time of ADAS systems.”

Austrian privacy activist and attorney Max Schrems said the U.S. government asked the Irish High Court to weigh in on his case against Facebook (see 1606020018). Schrems, who's best known for successfully challenging the trans-Atlantic safe harbor agreement due in part to U.S. surveillance programs, said in a Monday news release that the U.S. government wants to join as an amicus curiae because it "likely wants to defend its surveillance laws before the European Courts." Schrems is fighting Facebook's use of model contracts, which is one vehicle that businesses use to legally transfer data to the U.S. as European Union officials still assess Privacy Shield, the new mechanism that would replace safe harbor (see 1606060034). In the release, Schrems said he welcomes the U.S. government's involvement. "This is a huge chance to finally get solid answers in a public procedure," he said. "I am very much looking forward to raise all the uncomfortable questions on US surveillance programs in this procedure. It will be very interesting how the US government will react to the clear evidence already before the court." DOJ didn't comment.

Some 8.1 billion devices were connected worldwide at the end of last year, said an IHS report Friday, counting smartphones, tablets, PCs, TVs, set-top boxes and audio devices. That's an average four devices per household, IHS said. Smartphones are adding a half billion new devices to the market each year, five times that of tablets, with the ratio expected to widen to 10:1 by 2020, IHS said. Google shipped 3.7 million Chromecast units in Q1, outnumbering Apple TV shipments (1.7 million) for the first time, a trend IHS expects to continue as the companies pursue “vastly different strategies.” The $149 Apple TV has carved out a space at the high end for digital video streamers and gamers in the Apple ecosystem. At $35, Chromecast is a “bargain,” providing a no-frills experience that complements Android devices, said analyst Merrick Kingston. Leading all streaming video companies, Netflix addressed 339 million connected devices in the U.S. at the end of 2015, or about a third of the AV hardware landscape, said Kingston. Pay-TV media apps “are virtually guaranteed to sit alongside the Netflix application on consumers’ end devices,” he said

Facebook and Twitter are the newest members of CTA, the trade group said in a Thursday announcement.

Technology will again play a major role in the upcoming holiday season, but it won’t be just products that consumers buy driving end-of-year sales, said a National Retail Federation report. While the expected TVs, PCs and Oculus Rift virtual reality headsets are primed to be top sellers come November, wearables and video streaming also will be factors on the gift side, and buy buttons and mobile payments will influence the way consumers make purchases, NRF said. It cited a Synchrony Financial report from early this year saying eight of the top 10 retail trends for 2016 involve technology. Topics to keep an eye on, said NRF: (1) how social media and in-store shopping experiences blend, (2) how retail takes advantage of location-based strategies, (3) whether augmented reality and VR play a role, (4) if messaging services and bots “become the new apps,” (5) how online marketplaces will change the landscape, (6) the impact of payment options on the bottom line, (7) whether Singles Day (Nov. 11) gains traction with early-bird shoppers in the U.S. and (8) how two additional shopping days will affect holiday season sales compared with 2015.