An Australian regulator sued Facebook on Wednesday accusing it of collecting user data without permission, building on government efforts around the world to rein in the social network.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) said it was seeking an unspecified fine from Facebook for promoting a virtual private network as a way for people to protect their data, while secretly using the information to pick targets for commercial acquisitions.

The lawsuit echoes a landmark US Federal Trade Commission action accusing the social media giant of inappropriately maintaining market dominance by using customer data to decide on takeover targets including messaging app Whatsapp and image-sharing app Instagram.

“There is a link to what the FTC is saying, but they’re looking at a competition issue,” ACCC Chairman Rod Sims said at a televised news conference. “We’re looking at the consumer.”

A Facebook spokeswoman said the company was “always clear about the information we collect and how it is used”.

“We will review the recent filing by the ACCC and will continue to defend our position in response to this recent filing,” she added.

Facebook shut down the VPN product in 2019.

Earlier this month, Australia went ahead with plans to make Facebook and Internet giant Google pay domestic media outlets for content that appeared on their websites, at Sims’s recommendation.

The Australian privacy regulator has a separate lawsuit against Facebook accusing it of breaching user privacy with a personality test run by political marketing consultant Cambridge Analytica. Facebook is defending that action. The ACCC is also suing Google alleging it misled users about data collection.

Unlike the US lawsuit, which may force Facebook to sell assets, the Australian lawsuit may force the company to change the way it discloses its activities to users, said Rob Nicholls, a University of New South Wales associate professor who specialises in competition law.

“Rather than take the antitrust approach of ‘the only way to solve this is to break it up’, it’s more ‘we’re going to take the actions that we can under the existing law to change the conduct so that it is acceptable to Australian consumers and Australian businesses,” Nicholls said.

© Thomson Reuters 2020

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For example, The College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., added extra VPN user licenses for students and staff now working from home. It also ramped up its VPN-server capacity, according to Dr. Ellen J. Keohane, the college’s CIO. “We’re definitely seeing higher demand on that.”

To accommodate remote learning, the school is using cloud-based services including Google Meet, Panapto (for video recording), and Zoom for videoconferencing. The college bought an upgrade to Zoom Enterprise, which adds classroom features such as breakouts and “raise hand”. It also integrates with Google email and calendars, Keohane said.

She said technology companies have been helpful. “I’m very happy to see some of the technology vendors stepping up to offer free services, such as Google adding Meet Premium to G Suite for Education customers, which allows recording of Google Meet conferencing sessions,” said Keohane. “I suppose it’s in their interest long-term, but not having to spend the extra money for the services at this time is really helpful.”https://imasdk.googleapis.com/js/core/bridge3.436.0_en.html#goog_1802015990Volume 0% 

A larger challenge is working with students to get them Chromebooks or other computers. The school is also scrambling to get enough wireless hot-spot devices that use WAN services such as 4G for Internet access. They can be used to connect students who don’t have broadband internet access at home.

Students who do have home broadband may still have trouble connecting to two-way video and classroom services that require high bandwidth. “Families may need to coordinate who is working online and for what content, giving priority to synchronous school work,” said Keohane.

A recent upgrade helps USC

The IT staff at the University of Southern California found itself in luck when students were sent home to finiish off the semester. “The complete re-architecting and replacement of our network that finished in January was capable of supporting the increased demand,” said Douglas Shook, the CIO at USC. “We are fortunate that we invested in our networks prior to COVID-19.”

Shook said the school had signed enterprise licenses for Zoom and Slack in the fall, and that resource was in place for remote learning when the outbreak occurred.

The one upgrade the school needed: VPN server capacity, primarily to meet the demands of faculty and staff who are working from home, he said.

Students now take classes online are using a hybrid approach: the Blackboard app for course materials and Zoom for live, interactive lectures. The school overestimated the need for Blackboard by several times and quadrupled the number of VPN ports to support the demand.

“We prepared for our first online-only classes in less than one week,” Shook said. “We are continuing to add capacity, documentation, support, help desk capacity, etc., on an ongoing basis.”

The school said it will provide details soon on guidelines for technology assistance for people working from home.

A survey of students before they were sent home found that some had weak internet connections at home, so the school is working on recommendations to address that, including wireless hotspots.

USC also invested in online test-taking software, and spent time creating online training, documentation and help-desk support, Shook said. “The technology upgrades were one aspect,” he said. “The human change management and support probably has been equally challenging.”

VPN upgrades at San Jose State

San Jose State University and its 40,000 students and staffers benefitted from a network upgrade already underway that allowed it to adapt quickly to online-learning demands. It took the IT staff about four to five days to upgrade VPNs and add licenses for online-learning platforms.

“There was no way we would have been able to do this if we hadn’t started this process three years ago and hadn’t looked at the technologies we would need to enable work from anywhere,” said Bob Lim, the university’s CIO and vice president of IT. “When we were given the green light to move forward online, we did it almost without any hiccups.”

Like many other schools, San Jose State upgraded its VPN access. The team installed a new Cisco firewall appliance, boosting the university’s remote-access VPN supports to 10,000 concurrent connections to AnyConnect VPN clients. Shai Silberman, the school’s network services manager, said the number of connections was chosen to support the work-from-anywhere scenarios, not as a specific response to the coronavirus situation. While the previous average was between 70 and 100 concurrent sessions, the team saw an uptick to about 500 due to the new work-at-home requirements for staffers.

While many students do not need the VPN access for regular online classroom learning or videoconferencing, the school is investigating the need for students in labs to be able to access their work remotely. Some areas of the school, such as medical facilities, also need the additional secure access due to HIPAA regulations.

In addition, Lim said the goal of the VPN upgrade was to make sure employees and students have the same network experience, whether they’re on the VPN or on the campus network.

 “[The 10,000 connections are] way beyond what we need, but the reality is we don’t know how long this will sustain,” said Silberman. “We are investigating how we extend the laboratory experiences out to people’s homes, and that will be dependent on VPN as well.”

Silbmeran said staff members who had been working as campus call center agents and other roles now work at home, and that requires secure remote access.

Lim said a big focus for the team was to make sure their network would be ready for the future, which will change teaching and learning methods as a result of the coronavirus outbreak.

For example, he said many people feel that support systems need to be situated on campus, but in reality with secure VPNs those tasks can be handled farther away. “For many organizations, campus buildings are very important,” Lim said. “We’re looking at moving non-essential areas or areas that don’t deal with students on a regular basis, moving them out further so the campus can be more student-focused in terms of teaching and learning.”

Other areas that the IT team has dealt with in recent weeks include:

• Training staffers, teachers and students on using the online tools, which includes programs like Zoom and the Canvas by Instructure classroom learning management system.
• Transferring desktop phone numbers over to cell phones for staffers.
• Assisting students with equipment needs such as Chromebooks, webcams, microphones and other computers for secure access.

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A VPN – or otherwise Virtual Private Network – is a very important technology that is widely used from many internet users! It usually requires remote network users to certify and often secures data with encryption technologies to prevent the dissemination of private information to unauthorized third parties. Another important thing is that it reduces costs because it does not need a physical leased line to connect remote users to an Intranet.

The reason it was created is the army! As you can imagine, it was created for security reasons and so that no one can intercept conversations and data. Today it is used by many users who seek extra security in their connection. The main idea is that with the VPN the connection that goes on the Internet does not follow a random route like all to reach its destination but follows a separate channel. This way one cannot get in between and steal or hear information transmitted.

Now let’s see exactly how it works.

First you have to understand that when a computer wants to communicate with someone else regardless of what it is doing, is to tell its router  “I want to contact IP x. x. x. x “.

Then the router tells the next router (probably in the provider)  “I want to contact IP x. x. x. x “.

This router is connected to another 10  (hypothetically speaking) depending on the region and each of the 10 has an IP range.

So he looks at exactly where the IP is and says to that router  “I want to contact IP x. x. x. x “.

The same goes for the next router, etc.

So, in general, it is almost random from which routers will pass the message to reach the final recipient. Here enters the VPN network where virtually does not select each router for him to send the message. A channel is created and there is a secure communication between them!

There are several VPN networks:

• The protocols used for the traffic tunnel
• The terminal point of the tunnel, that is, the client edge or the edge of the supply network
• Whether they offer from a page-to-page or remote access connection
• The security levels provided
• The OSI layer that they present to connect the network, such as Level 2 or Level 3 circuits to the network.

More and more people are using a personal VPN, as more and more interactions appear on the Internet (purchases, sales etc). That is why there are so many options when it comes to VPN providers.

Some companies offer free VPN, and most require a subscription.  All of their networks are different and each has specific features (speed, simultaneous connections, firewall-firewall, cost, server location…).

BE CAREFUL WITH FREE VPN!

Nothing is ever pragmatically free in this world… Companies can collect your data and your browsing habits or worse.  They can still sell your bandwidth (bandwidth), or use them for malicious software.  Using free VPN will cause a lot of problems, but now you’re up to date: Use a free VPN at your own risk.

Summarizing with a VPN you can protect your data and your privacy and gain access to websites and content that is usually limited.

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