Facebook began testing tools to update aspects of its name verification and reporting processes, it said in a news release Tuesday. The tools are meant to address the goals of reducing the number of people asked to verify that their Facebook profile name is the one people know them by, and making it easier for users to confirm their names if necessary. Facebook said it's adding additional steps to the names reporting process, which will "help our review teams better understand why someone is reporting a name, giving more information about a specific situation." The company is also testing a tool allowing those asked to verify their names to provide more information about their specific situation. Early next year, Facebook said, it will begin looking at other ways to reduce the number of people who go through the ID verification experience, while "preserving the safety of other people on the site." The new tools are being tested on a limited basis across mobile and desktop platforms in the U.S., Facebook said.

Mozilla said it's allowing Firefox users to block third-party trackers in private browsing mode, giving users more control over how they share data. The company said Tuesday in a blog post it recently introduced that functionality, which is based on the blocklist provided by its partner Disconnect. "A basic protection list is on by default in Private Browsing with Tracking Protection and it shields against many ad, analytics and social trackers," the post said. "If you want increased protection from tracking, Firefox now allows you to choose a ‘strict’ protection blocklist which will block additional content trackers such as those often found in video, photo and embeddable content." But Mozilla said some users have said some websites don't work properly when the strict list is used.

ICANN CEO Fadi Chehadé urged the U.N. Tuesday to continue bringing together all Internet governance stakeholders to solve issues as part of a “polycentric approach” to Internet governance. “The Internet is the great equalizer in [a] world where inequality is still a key challenge,” he said. Chehadé was among the Internet industry executives addressing the U.N. as it began its two-day high-level meeting on its 10-year review of the outcomes of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS+10). A draft WSIS+10 outcome document circulated before the U.N.’s high-level meeting endorses the central tenets of multistakeholder Internet governance and recommits to WSIS' Tunis Agreement. The draft document would also extend the Internet Governance Forum's mandate for another 10 years, as expected (see 1511200063).

DearMob released an upgrade for 5KPlayer for Windows version 3.2 that it said Friday is to optimize H.265/HEVC video codec playback of 4K and 8K UHD videos for “much smoother” H.265 streaming. The upgrade added a feature that allows the app to play a portion of damaged H.265 files, it said.

Basic streaming media sticks will be a popular gift item this holiday season, due to competitive pricing and expanded over-the-top services, said Barbara Kraus, Parks Associates research director, in a research note Friday. Fourteen percent of U.S. broadband households plan to buy a streaming media player by mid-2016, with 31 percent owning one by Q3, said Kraus. Next year, devices will differentiate through additional content options and new technologies such as 4K video, Kraus said. "Ultimately consumers want a simple, uninterrupted experience in accessing OTT content, so that will be the minimum expectation for any device, regardless of the cost.” Kraus said two-thirds of U.S. broadband households connect at least one device to the Internet, with Xbox the leading device used for streaming in 14 percent of U.S. broadband households. Following are PlayStation at just under 14 percent and Roku at 10 percent, it said.

New top-level domains “are not treated any differently than traditional domain names like .com or .org” within Google's search results, Google Domains Product Marketing Manager Chad Lancaster said in a blog post Thursday on “common questions” about new TLDs. “Domain names with new endings are shown in search just like any other domain name.” Lancaster suggested website owners prepare URL mapping from current URLs to their corresponding new URLs when moving to a new TLD, along with configuring for redirection of site contents to the new URLs. “It takes time to be fully processed in Google Search, but once it is, your new domain name is expected to work just like your old domain name,” Lancaster said.

Worldwide spending on IoT will grow from $698 billion in 2015 to nearly $1.3 trillion in 2019, an IDC report said Thursday. The Asia/Pacific region leads in IoT spending, with 40 percent of the market, followed by North America and Western Europe, at a combined $250 billion this year, IDC said. In North America, the fastest growing IoT use case is retail marketing, it said. “In-store contextual marketing is growing rapidly as retailers try to capture continuous, real-time streams of data from mobile devices, online customer activity, in-store Wi-Fi routers/beacons, and video cameras in order to gain insight into customer behavior and desires.”

Certain legal aspects of algorithms and information collection and distribution aren't particularly well defined, and more transparency is needed to illuminate the data used by algorithms to make decisions for individuals, panelists said at a New America Foundation event Thursday. Algorithms normally put out information or conclusions that aren't "super surprising," University of Maryland College of Information Studies associate professor Jennifer Golbeck said, and shouldn't be relied on as the ultimate source for a decision. "The things we have to keep in mind with algorithms today is that they are going to tell us stuff, but we absolutely have to have intelligent humans taking that as one piece of input that they use to make decisions," Golbeck said. "[And] not just handing control over to the algorithms and [letting] them make decisions on their own because they are going to be wrong a lot of the time. They are not going to do things as well as a human can do." Ian Bogost, Georgia Institute of Technology professor of interactive computing, urged the media to delve deeper into the actual processes behind the operation of algorithms, rather than simply equating them to an all-knowing, mystical being. "The way we discuss algorithms in the media really does matter," he said. Laura Moy, New America's Open Technology Institute's senior policy counsel, said when thinking of the problematic outcomes of the innovative uses of algorithms, "a lot of times there aren't really clear legal 'don'ts,'" and pointed to consumer privacy as another issue presented by algorithms and data collection. Moy said algorithms have the potential to perpetuate human biases and could have "some sort of disparate impact" on users, also saying it's difficult to identify or correct the addition of human biases in algorithms. It would be worth thinking about building in ways we can check for bias and to identify it when using algorithms to produce a service or result, she said. "At a basic level, transparency about what information is going in and how it might be used to make decisions that could impact the individual, that level of transparency to the individual is important." Moy also said regulators are looking into correcting bias in algorithms in their design, and a few federal agencies have been thinking about it as a fairness issue and starting to address it. "From the regulators' perspective, full transparency, full insight into what all of the inputs [into algorithms] might possibly be and [in]to how it works is important," said Moy.

User numbers for infidelity app Ashley Madison are "bouncing back," and in Q3 hit where they were before the summer's high-profile data breach that resulted in millions of users being revealed (see 1507200017), said online security company AVG Technologies in a report Tuesday. "Perhaps in anticipation of a 'singleton' Christmas, dating and cheating apps, in general, saw an uptick in usage over the third quarter, with Ashley Madison competitor platforms MiuMeet and AnastasiaDate both joining the app in seeing a rise in numbers from the previous quarter," AVG said in a news release. The report highlights app usage trends, analyzing anonymous data from more than 1 million AVG Android app users.

After a torrid rate of holiday-season online and mobile shopping growth (see here, 1512030017 and 1512020033), Adobe said Monday that growth slowed on the Web to 7.7 percent. Average order values (AOV) for electronics, down year over year, reached a peak on Thanksgiving at $162, and fell since Cyber Monday, the company said. Consumers spent $149 on average for electronics so far this season, compared with $176 in 2014, it said. After a record-setting Black Friday ($2.74 billion) and Cyber Monday ($3.07 billion), Monday of this week and Dec. 14 are forecast to be the third- and fourth-highest online sales days of the holiday season, Adobe said. Online sales for Dec. 7 were forecast to have reached $1.92 billion, while online sales for Dec. 14 are expected to hit $1.95 billion, Adobe said. Mobile’s influence continues to be felt, at 27 percent of online sales revenue ($2.5 billion) during the first six days of December, Adobe said. That’s down from a record 32 percent over Thanksgiving weekend, it said. Findings are based on aggregated and anonymous data from 3.7 billion visits to 4,500 retail websites, and Adobe measures 80 percent of online transactions from the top 100 U.S. retailers.