It has been, to be quite honest, a fairly bad week, as far as weeks go. But despite the sustained downbeat news, a few good things managed to happen as well. So we'll start with those.
California has passed the strongest digital privacy law in the United States[1], for starters, which as of 2020 will give customers the right to know what data companies use, and to disallow those companies from selling it. It's just the latest in a string of uncommonly good bits of privacy news[2], which included last week's landmark Supreme Court decision in Carpenter v. US[3]. That ruling will require law enforcement to get a warrant before accessing cell tower location data. And at the beginning of the week, the Wi-Fi Alliance detailed the full specifications of the WPA3 security standard[4] that's going to make the next generation of Wi-Fi much, much safer to use.
And then there's the bad news. A marketing firm called Exactis left as many as 340 million personal information records[5] sitting on the open internet for anyone to find. Anthony Kennedy announced that he'll retire from the Supreme Court, an absence that will have ramifications[6] for privacy and technology. The next arms race is going to happen in space[7], which will be less fun than it sounds. And Congress wants to talk with[8] Cambridge Analytica alum Matt Oczkowski about whether his new firm, Data Propria[9], will just repeat the same indiscretions as is former employer.
But wait, there's more! As always, we’ve rounded up all the news we didn’t break or cover in depth this week. Click on the headlines to read the