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Partners
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Good morning!
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It's Dennis here. And compliments of the season!
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Today's addition underscores the topsy-turvy situation at the heart of the Nigerian legislative arm. The House of Assembly said it was going to have a public hearing on the controversial Code of Practice drafted by the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) this year.
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The Code drew outrage from Nigerians who claim that it could stifle freedom of expression on the internet. Now, the House of Assembly said that it will not have that hearing anymore. According to reports, the House said that the hearing will now be postponed to sometime in January, I guess that is more convenient.
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| Below are the tech stories and news you need to know to start your day, carefully curated by Technext. |
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Summary of the news
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- SEC General Counsel has resigned after reports that he had a private relationship with FTX founder
- Nigeria’s House of Assembly has adjourned its public hearing on the NITDA bill
- Facebook parent Meta has agreed to pay $725 million to settle the privacy lawsuit
- TikTok is now facing a potential ban in the US
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SEC General Counsel resigns after links to FTX crash
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According to a report by the Washington Examiner, General Counsel of the US securities and exchange commission (SEC) Dan Berkovitz announced that he would quit his role on the 31st of January.
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The report cites that the resignation announcement rolled after discovering that the government official had previously “wined and dined” with FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried and his lobbyists.
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Technext reports that Berkovitz previously served as the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) commissioner. “After thirty-four years of public service, it is time for me to pursue new and different challenges and opportunities,” Berkovitz said. His announcement came the same day that SBF was released for a bail of $250 million.
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Several emails acquired by the watchdog Protect the Public Trust revealed that Berkovitz maintained a cordial relationship with Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX. In the report, Dan Berkovitz, Sam Bankman-Fried, FTX General Counsel Ryne Miller, and FTX Brett Harrison met in an opulent restaurant in October 2021.
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“If ever there was a scene to conjure up a vision of a D.C rigged toward corrupt insiders at the expense of the little guy, it would be difficult to top this one,” Michael Chamberlain, director of Protect the Public’s Trust, said.
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House of Assembly adjourns NITDA bill hearing
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Nigeria’s House of Assembly has postponed the public hearing on the proposed amendment of the establishing act of the country’s digital economy regulator, the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), earlier scheduled for Friday, December 23.
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The postponement is due to the absence of key stakeholders of the amendment bill, TechCabal reports.
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The public hearing will now be held on a yet-to-be-decided date in January 2023.
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Absent from the public hearing were the majority of the members of the Senate Committee on ICT and Cyber Security, the minister of communications and digital economy, Isa Ali Pantami, and the director-general of NITDA, Katie Inuwa Abdullahi.
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The NITDA bill could have far-reaching consequences for internet freedom, media, social media companies, and all other technology companies operating in the country. The hearing was therefore supposed to allow tech stakeholders, media companies, civil society organisations, and the government to discuss the provisions of the increasingly controversial bill.
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Polygon is a decentralised Ethereum scaling platform that enables developers to build scalable user-friendly dApps with low transaction fees without ever sacrificing security.
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Meta agrees to pay $725m to settle privacy lawsuit
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Facebook parent Meta has agreed to pay $725 million to settle a class action lawsuit that claimed the social media giant gave third parties access to user data without their consent, CNBC reports.
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It is the “largest recovery ever achieved in a data privacy class action and the most Facebook has ever paid to resolve a private class action,” Keller Rohrback L.L.P, the law firm representing the plaintiffs, said in a court filing late Thursday announcing the settlement.
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The case was broadened to focus on Facebook’s overall data-sharing practices. Plaintiffs alleged that Facebook “granted numerous third parties access to their Facebook content and information without their consent, and that Facebook failed to adequately monitor the third parties’ access to, and use of, that information,” according to the law firm behind the lawsuit.
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TikTok faces US ban
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The Financial Times reports that over the summer, four employees on the ByteDance internal audit team looked into the sharing of internal information to journalists. Two members of staff in the US and two in China gained access to the IP addresses and other personal data of FT journalist Cristina Criddle, to work out if she was in the proximity of any ByteDance employees, the company said.
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FT further reports that a BuzzFeed journalist and several users connected to the reporters through their TikTok accounts were also targeted in the ByteDance probe.
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Which, obviously, is a fairly significant violation user privacy, while also running counter to press freedom, and in opposition to the many public statements that TikTok has made in regards to how its Chinese staff access US user info.
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Latest in funding
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Other stories we are following
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