Tag: consumer

Posted on

Time to protect consumer privacy

Some of the biggest names in the tech world joined forces Monday to tell Uncle Sam that enough’s
enough:

Quit spying on their customers.

According to the LA Times, “AOL, Apple, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Twitter and Yahoo said in an open letter to President Obama that in light of recent revelations about the National Security Agency snooping

imgres on websites and communications networks, there’s an “urgent need to reform government surveillance practices worldwide.”

“That’s a pretty bold claim to the moral high ground considering that each of these companies routinely mines customer data for their own purposes (read: profit)

And then there’s AT&T, which made clear in a letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission last week that it will keep complying with government requests for customer records “to the extent required by law.”

“Moreover, the telecom giant said the company shouldn’t have to come clean with shareholders about helping the feds peek into people’s lives. This stuff is top secret, AT&T said, so it has no obligation to address the issue at its annual shareholder meeting this spring. The company’s letter was a response to calls from the ACLU of Northern California and other groups for phone companies to be more upfront about their dealings with the NSA. The private sector always has had a troubled relationship with consumer privacy. Continue reading “Time to protect consumer privacy”

Posted on

Jobs are returning to the U.S.

imgres

American manufacturing lost more than two million jobs during the recession, accelerating a decline that had begun long ago in the 1970s.

Yet since then, manufacturing has been one of the biggest drivers of job growth in the US, adding more than 500,000 jobs.

The BBC reports that “While much of that job growth could be attributable to post-recession pent-up demand, that is not the whole story.According to the Reshoring Initiative, a group of companies and trade associations trying to bring factory jobs back to the US, about 10% of those job gains – 50,000 jobs – were created by companies bringing back manufacturing from overseas. Continue reading “Jobs are returning to the U.S.”