It's long been known that Google pays Apple a hefty sum every year to ensure that it remains the default search engine on iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Now, a new report from analysts at Bernstein suggests that the payment from Google to Apple may reach $15 billion in 2021, up from $10 billion in 2020. 9to5Mac reports: In the investor note, seen by Ped30, Bernstein analysts are estimating that Google's payment to Apple will increase to $15 billion in 2021, and to between $18 billion and $20 billion in 2022. The data is based on "disclosures in Apple's public filings as well as a bottom-up analysis of Google's TAC (traffic acquisition costs) payments." Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi says that Google is likely "paying to ensure Microsoft doesn't outbid it." The analysts outline two potential risks for the Google payment to Apple, including regulatory risk and Google simply deciding the deal is no longer worth it:

In an interview earlier this year, Apple's senior director of global privacy Jane Horvath offered reasoning for the deal, despite privacy concerns: "Right now, Google is the most popular search engine. We do support Google but we also have built-in support for DuckDuckGo, and we recently also rolled out support for Ecosia."

Facebook has been ordered to pay $5.5 million for creating and storing facial recognition templates of 200,000 local users without proper consent between April 2018 and September 2019, according to South Korea's government data protection watchdog, the Personal Information Protection Commission (PIPC). Netflix and Google also received reprimands or fines for insufficient privacy protections and violating laws. The Register reports: Another [$22,000] penalty was issued for illegally collecting social security numbers, not issuing notifications regarding personal information management changes, and other missteps. Facebook has been ordered to destroy facial information collected without consent or obtain consent, and was prohibited from processing identity numbers without legal basis. It was also ordered to destroy collected data and disclose contents related to foreign migration of personal information. Zuck's brainchild was then told to make it easier for users to check legal notices regarding personal information. The fine is the second-largest ever issued by the organization, the largest ever also going to Facebook. In November 2020 the Social Network was fined [$5.7 million] for passing on personal data to other operators without user permission.

Netflix's fine was a paltry [$188,000], with that sum imposed for collecting data from five million people without their consent, plus another [$2,700] for not disclosing international transfer of the data. Google got off the easiest, with just a "recommendation" to improve its personal data handling processes and make legal notices more precise. The PPIC said it is not done investigating methods of collecting personal information from overseas businesses and will continue with a legal review.

Alphabet's drone company Wing delivered 10,000 cups of coffee, 1,700 snack packs and 1,200 roast chickens to customers in Logan, Australia, over the last year, the company said Wednesday in a blog post outlining its progress. CNBC reports: Wing was launched in 2019 in Australia, following a series of drone tests that began in 2014. The service, which was initially part of Alphabet's experimental research division, allows users to order items such as food through a mobile app and is fast approaching 100,000 deliveries since its launch. Wing hopes to one day deliver products to people all over the world without having to rely on drivers or delivery trucks like other companies.

The company works with more than 30 partners globally, including local coffee shops and national brands such as Walgreens, according to a February blog post. Local businesses can also reach out directly to the company to get involved. In 2020, Wing partnered with a Virginia school district to deliver library books during the pandemic.

YouTube has issued a cease-and-desist order against the creator of Groovy, who has agreed to shut down the widely-popular music bot on August 30th. PC Gamer reports: Effectively a tool for adding background tunes to a chat room, Groovy worked by pulling audio directly from YouTube videos, joining voice calls, and playing music queued up by users [...]. It was ridiculously popular, reportedly installed on over 16 million servers. But it seems Google wasn't so hot on the bot, with a spokesperson for the company told The Verge that Groovy violated YouTube's terms of service for "modifying the service and using it for commercial purposes."

In that same report, Groovy creator Nik Ammerlaan (who made the bot because "my friend's bot sucked and I thought I could make a better one") admitted that this was likely a long-time coming. Groovy circumvents YouTube's front-end and advertising entirely. "I'm not sure why they decided to send it [a cease and desist] now," said Ammerlaan. "They probably just didn't know about it, to be honest. It was just a matter of seeing when it would happen."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Some of the most popular subreddits are protesting the proliferation of COVID-19 disinformation and conspiracy theories on the platform. Moderators from several high profile subreddits, including r/awww, r/showerthoughts, and r/pics, are now calling on the site to do a better job of curbing the spread of disinformation. "It is clear that even after promising to tackle the problem of misinformation on this site, nothing of substance has been done aside from quarantining a medium sized subreddit, which barely reduces traffic and does little to stop misinformation," user N8theGr8 posted said in a post announcing the protests, which lists dozens of subreddits who had signed on in solidarity.

Reddit pushed back 8 hours later with a post from CEO Steve Huffman in r/announcements. It didn't mention the thread specifically, but there's little doubt it was a response to calls to ban subreddits that spread disinformation. Huffman began by saying the CDC was the best source of up to date information about the pandemic and urged people to get vaccinated. "We appreciate that not everyone agrees with the current approach to getting us all through the pandemic, and some are still wary of vaccinations," Huffman said. "Dissent is a part of Reddit and the foundation of democracy. Reddit is a place for open and authentic discussion and debate. This includes conversations that question or disagree with popular consensus. This includes conversations that criticize those that disagree with the majority opinion. This includes protests that criticize or object to our decisions on which communities to ban from the platform."

Speaking of Google killing a product, ArsTechnica has a rundown on the company's 16 years long effort to dominate the messaging space to no success. From the report: Google Talk, Google's first-ever instant messaging platform, launched on August 24, 2005. This company has been in the messaging business for 16 years, meaning Google has been making messaging clients for longer than some of its rivals have existed. But thanks to a decade and a half of nearly constant strategy changes, competing product launches, and internal sabotage, you can't say Google has a dominant or even stable instant messaging platform today. Google's 16 years of messenger wheel-spinning has allowed products from more focused companies to pass it by. Embarrassingly, nearly all of these products are much younger than Google's messaging efforts. Consider competitors like WhatsApp (12 years old), Facebook Messenger (nine years old), iMessage (nine years old), and Slack (eight years old) -- Google Talk even had video chat four years before Zoom was a thing.

Currently, you would probably rank Google's offerings behind every other big-tech competitor. A lack of any kind of top-down messaging leadership at Google has led to a decade and a half of messaging purgatory, with Google both unable to leave the space altogether and unable to commit to a single product. While companies like Facebook and Salesforce invest tens of billions of dollars into a lone messaging app, Google seems content only to spin up an innumerable number of under-funded, unstable side projects led by job-hopping project managers. There have been periods when Google briefly produced a good messaging solution, but the constant shutdowns, focus-shifting, and sabotage of established products have stopped Google from carrying much of these user bases -- or user goodwill -- forward into the present day. Because no single company has ever failed at something this badly, for this long, with this many different products (and because it has barely been a month since the rollout of Google Chat), the time has come to outline the history of Google messaging. [...]

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google is infamous for spinning up products and killing them off, often in very short order. It's an annoying enough habit when it's stuff like messaging apps and games. But the tech giant's ambitions stretch into many domains that touch human lives these days. Including, most directly, healthcare. And -- it turns out -- so does Google's tendency to kill off products that its PR has previously touted as "life saving." To wit: Following a recent reconfiguration of Google's health efforts -- reported earlier by Business Insider -- the tech giant confirmed to TechCrunch that it is decommissioning its clinician support app, Streams. The app, which Google Health PR bills as a "mobile medical device," was developed back in 2015 by DeepMind, an AI division of Google -- and has been used by the U.K.'s National Health Service in the years since, with a number of NHS Trusts inking deals with DeepMind Health to roll out Streams to their clinicians.

At the time of writing, one NHS Trust -- London's Royal Free -- is still using the app in its hospitals. But, presumably, not for too much longer, since Google is in the process of taking Streams out back to be shot and tossed into its deadpool -- alongside the likes of its ill-fated social network, Google+, and Internet balloon company Loon, to name just two of a frankly endless list of now defunct Alphabet/Google products. Other NHS Trusts we contacted which had previously rolled out Streams told us they have already stopped using the app.

The non-fungible token industry is continuing to grow, though there are also signs of some less-than-desirable activity, according to a study from blockchain analytics platform Nansen. From a report: The industry "remains spotted by certain profit-seeking practices," Nansen cautioned, citing patterns in transactions that suggest token founders might be buying up the floor for certain projects. That could be an indication of "wash trading," a practice where a trader or group of traders buy and sell the same asset to create the illusion of heightened demand. "While something appears amiss, it definitely isn't incriminating evidence of wash trading, because they aren't being sold directly to each other," Nansen analyst Ling Young Loon said in an email. "The wallets that they eventually sell to may be related, but that would require a much more rigorous study."

Britain will attempt to move away from European data protection regulations as it overhauls its privacy rules after Brexit, the government has announced. From a report: The freedom to chart its own course could lead to an end to irritating cookie popups and consent requests online, said the culture secretary, Oliver Dowden, as he called for rules based on "common sense, not box-ticking." But any changes will be constrained by the need to offer a new regime that the EU deems adequate, otherwise data transfers between the UK and EU could be frozen. A new information commissioner will be put in charge of overseeing the transformation. John Edwards, currently the privacy commissioner of New Zealand, has been named as the government's preferred candidate to replace Elizabeth Denham, whose term in office will end on 31 October after a three-month extension.

Dowden said: "Now that we have left the EU I'm determined to seize the opportunity by developing a world-leading data policy that will deliver a Brexit dividend for individuals and businesses across the UK. It means reforming our own data laws so that they're based on common sense, not box-ticking. And it means having the leadership in place at the Information Commissioner's Office to pursue a new era of data-driven growth and innovation. John Edwards' vast experience makes him the ideal candidate to ensure data is used responsibly to achieve those goals." The GDPR data protection rules introduced by the EU in May 2018 are part of UK law even after Brexit, under the Data Protection Act.

sandbagger shares an excerpt from a MIT Technology Review article, written by Christopher Ankersen and Mike Martin: Despite their terrible human costs -- or perhaps because of them -- wars are often times of technological innovation. [...] But Afghanistan is different. There has been technological progress -- the evolution of drone warfare, for example. But the advances made by the US and its allies have not been as pronounced as those seen before, and they haven't been as profound as some experts have claimed. In fact, contrary to the typical narrative, the technological advances that have taken place during the 20 years of conflict have actually helped the Taliban more than the West. If wars are fought through innovation, the Taliban won. What do we mean? The West fought the war in much the same way from beginning to end. The first airstrikes in 2001 were conducted by B-52 bombers, the same model that first saw service in 1955; in August, the attacks that marked the end of US presence came from the same venerable model of aircraft. The Taliban, meanwhile, made some huge leaps. They began this war with AK-47s and other simple, conventional weapons, but today they have harnessed mobile telephony and the internet -- not just to improve their weapons and their command-and-control systems, but even more crucially, to carry out their strategic communications and their influence operations.

What accounts for this underwhelming and unevenly distributed technological gain? For the Taliban, the war in Afghanistan has been existential. Confronted with hundreds of thousands of foreign troops from NATO countries, and hunted on the ground and from the air, they had to adapt in order to survive. While the bulk of their fighting equipment has remained simple and easy to maintain (often no more than a Kalashnikov, some ammunition, a radio, and a headscarf), they have had to seek out new technology from other insurgent groups or develop their own. One key example: roadside bombs, or IEDs. These simple weapons caused more allied casualties than any other. Originally activated by pressure plates, like mines, they had evolved by the midpoint of the war so that the Taliban could set them off with mobile phones from anywhere with a cell signal. Because the Taliban's technological baseline was lower, the innovations they have made are all the more significant.

But the real technological advance for the Taliban took place at the strategic level. Acutely aware of their past shortcomings, they have attempted to overcome the weaknesses of their previous stint in government. Between 1996 and 2001, they preferred to be reclusive, and there was only one known photo of their leader, Mullah Omar. Since then, though, the Taliban have developed a sophisticated public affairs team, harnessing social media domestically and abroad. IED attacks would usually be recorded by mobile phone and uploaded to one of the many Taliban Twitter feeds to help with recruitment, fundraising, and morale. Another example is the technique of automatically scraping social media for key phrases like "ISI support" -- referring to Pakistan's security service, which has a relationship with the Taliban -- and then unleashing an army of online bots to send messages that attempt to refashion the image of the movement.

For the coalition, things were quite different. Western forces did have access to a wide range of world-class technology, from space-based surveillance to remotely operated systems like robots and drones. But for them, the war in Afghanistan was not a war of survival; it was a war of choice. And because of this, much of the technology was aimed at reducing the risk of casualties rather than achieving outright victory. Western forces invested heavily in weapons that could remove soldiers from harm's way -- air power, drones -- or technology that could speed up the delivery of immediate medical treatment. Things that keep the enemy at arm's length or protect soldiers from harm, such as gunships, body armor, and roadside-bomb detection, have been the focus for the West. The West's overarching military priority has been elsewhere: in the battle between greater powers. Technologically, that means investing in hypersonic missiles to match those of China or Russia, for instance, or in military artificial intelligence to try outwitting them. In closing, the authors say that technology "is not a driver of conflict, nor a guarantor of victory. Instead, it is an enabler."

"It also tells us that the battlefields of tomorrow might look a lot like Afghanistan," they add. "[W]e will see fewer purely technological conflicts that are won by the military with the greatest firepower, and more old and new technologies fielded side by side."

Passengers escaped an Alaska Airlines jet via emergency slides on Monday night after a malfunctioning smartphone filled the cabin with smoke. The Register reports: The pilot ordered the evacuation of flight 751 from New Orleans to Seattle after someone's cellphone started to spit out sparks and smoke just after landing. As the aircraft was still waiting on the tarmac at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport for a gate, the slides were deployed and all 129 passengers and six crew made it out. The errant mobile was also stuffed in a bag to curb its compact conflagration. Two people, we're told, were taken to hospital.

"The crew acted swiftly using fire extinguishers and a battery containment bag to stop the phone from smoking," a spokesperson for Alaska Airlines told The Register. "Crew members deployed the evacuation slides due to hazy conditions inside the cabin. Two guests were treated at a local area hospital." Airport officials, meanwhile, said "only minor scrapes and bruises were reported." It's unknown which device malfunctioned on this flight, but it makes us think back to the Galaxy Note 7 fiasco of 2016 that prompted Samsung to formally recall the smartphone after nearly 100 reports of them catching fire and spewing noxious black smoke. The Note 7 was also banned from aircraft in the United States under an emergency order.

A Norwegian company has created the world's first zero-emission, autonomous cargo ship that is expected to journey between two Norwegian towns before the end of the year. CNN reports: It's not the first autonomous ship -- an autonomous ferry launched in Finland in 2018 -- but it is the first fully electric container ship, say its makers. Developed by chemical company Yara International, the Yara Birkeland was designed to reduce emissions of nitrogen oxides, which are toxic pollutants and greenhouse gases, and carbon dioxide, as well as moving freight away from roads to the sea. The shipping industry currently accounts for between 2.5% and 3% of global greenhouse gases emissions, according to the International Maritime Organization.

First conceptualized in 2017, the ship was created in partnership with technology firm Kongsberg Maritime and shipbuilder Vard. Capable of carrying 103 containers and with a top speed of 13 knots, it will use a 7 MWh battery, with "about a thousand times the capacity of one electrical car," according to Jon Sletten, plant manager for Yara's factory in Porsgrunn, Norway. He says it will be charged at the quayside "before sailing to container harbors along the coast and then back again, replacing 40,000 truck journeys a year."

Facebook has approached academics and policy experts about forming a commission to advise it on global election-related matters, said five people with knowledge of the discussions, a move that would allow the social network to shift some of its political decision-making to an advisory body. The New York Times reports: The proposed commission could decide on matters such as the viability of political ads and what to do about election-related misinformation, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the discussions were confidential. Facebook is expected to announce the commission this fall in preparation for the 2022 midterm elections, they said, though the effort is preliminary and could still fall apart. Outsourcing election matters to a panel of experts could help Facebook sidestep criticism of bias by political groups, two of the people said. The company has been blasted in recent years by conservatives, who have accused Facebook of suppressing their voices, as well as by civil rights groups and Democrats for allowing political misinformation to fester and spread online. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive, does not want to be seen as the sole decision maker on political content, two of the people said.

If an election commission is formed, it would emulate the step Facebook took in 2018 when it created what it calls the Oversight Board, a collection of journalism, legal and policy experts who adjudicate whether the company was correct to remove certain posts from its platforms. Facebook has pushed some content decisions to the Oversight Board for review, allowing it to show that it does not make determinations on its own. Facebook, which has positioned the Oversight Board as independent, appointed the people on the panel and pays them through a trust.

Internal conversations around an election commission date back to at least a few months ago, said three people with knowledge of the matter. An election commission would differ from the Oversight Board in one key way, the people said. While the Oversight Board waits for Facebook to remove a post or an account and then reviews that action, the election commission would proactively provide guidance without the company having made an earlier call, they said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica, written by Tim De Chant: GM announced last Friday that it was recalling every Chevrolet Bolt it had ever made, including the new electric utility vehicle model that debuted this year. After a string of fires affected Bolt models, the company traced the problem to two simultaneously occurring defects in the cars' LG Chem-made batteries. The automaker initially discovered the problem in batteries from one of LG's Korean plants, and it recalled cars with those cells last November. But then more Bolts caught fire, and other LG plants were ensnared in the investigation, spurring two expansions of the recall. The problem, GM said, has been traced to a torn anode tab and a folded separator.

That's all GM has said so far. It hasn't said how widespread the defects are, nor has it said how, exactly, the fires started. But in what little information has been released, and in the timing of GM's recalls, there are clues. To decipher them, Ars spoke with Greg Less, technical director of the University of Michigan's Battery Lab. "What we're looking at is a perfect storm," Less said. The Bolt's battery packs are made up of pouch-type cells, which are essentially layers of cathodes, anodes, and separators that are flooded with liquid electrolyte and encased in a flexible polymer pouch. The torn anode tab, he said, would create a projection in what should be an otherwise flat battery. The projection brings the anode closer to the cathode. "And that would probably be OK if the separator was where it was supposed to be," he said.

But in problematic Bolt batteries, the separator wasn't where it was supposed to be. Separators are placed between the anode and cathode to prevent the two electrodes from touching. A torn tab wouldn't necessarily be an issue on its own because the separator would prevent any projection from bridging the anode-cathode gap. In cells with a folded separator, though, the gap would be missing from at least part of the battery. If the anode bridges the gap, Less said, "you have a short, and it's all downhill from there." "It wouldn't surprise me if both defects are caused by the same thing," he added. "I would imagine that the separator must be folded at the edge near where the anode tab is at. What I'm guessing is that at some point during the handling of the cell, before it's fully packaged, some part of the robot machine is catching. The tab is catching, the separator is catching -- something is catching very infrequently so that it hasn't been noticed, and it's causing this damage."

An anonymous reader writes: Software used by the Department of Homeland Security to scan the records of millions of immigrants can automatically flag naturalized Americans to potentially have their citizenship revoked based on secret criteria, according to documents reviewed by The Intercept. The software, known as ATLAS, takes information from immigrants' case files and runs it though various federal databases. ATLAS looks for indicators that someone is dangerous or dishonest and is ostensibly designed to detect fraud among people who come into contact with the U.S. immigration system. But advocates for immigrants believe that the real purpose of the computer program is to create a pretext to strip people of citizenship. Whatever the motivation, ATLAS's intended outcome is ultimately deportation, judging from the documents, which originate within DHS and were obtained by the Open Society Justice Initiative and Muslim Advocates through Freedom of Information Act lawsuits.

ATLAS helps DHS investigate immigrants' personal relationships and backgrounds, examining biometric information like fingerprints and, in certain circumstances, considering an immigrant's race, ethnicity, and national origin. It draws information from a variety of unknown sources, plus two that have been criticized as being poorly managed: the FBI's Terrorist Screening Database, also known as the terrorist watchlist, and the National Crime Information Center. Powered by servers at tech giant Amazon, the system in 2019 alone conducted 16.5 million screenings and flagged more than 120,000 cases of potential fraud or threats to national security and public safety. Ultimately, humans at DHS are involved in determining how to handle immigrants flagged by ATLAS. But the software threatens to amplify the harm caused by bureaucratic mistakes within the immigration system, mistakes that already drive many denaturalization and deportation cases. "ATLAS should be considered as suspect until it is shown not to generate unfair, arbitrary, and discriminatory results," said Laura Bingham, a lawyer with the Open Society Justice Initiative. "From what we are able to scrutinize in terms of the end results -- like the disparate impact of denaturalization based on national origin -- there is ample reason to consider ATLAS a threat to naturalized citizens."

Jeremy Keith, a web developer and contributor to the web standards movement, has resigned from the AMP Advisory Committee. Keith was selected for the committee last year, despite his well-documented criticisms of the AMP project. From a report: In his resignation email, he cites Google's control of the project and its small percentage of open source parts as reasons for his growing resentment: "I can't in good faith continue to advise on the AMP project for the OpenJS Foundation when it has become clear to me that AMP remains a Google product, with only a subset of pieces that could even be considered open source. If I were to remain on the advisory committee, my feelings of resentment about this situation would inevitably affect my behaviour. So it's best for everyone if I step away now instead of descending into outright sabotage. It's not you, it's me."

During his time with the committee, Keith worked on defining what AMP is and pushing for clarification on whether the project encompasses more than just a collection of web components. The Google-controlled AMP cache and validation aspects of the project were the most concerning in evaluating his continued participation.

Facebook is considering building products and features related to nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, the digital assets that have taken off with the rise of blockchain technology. From a report: "We're definitely looking at the number of ways to get involved in the space because we think we're in a really good position to do so," Facebook executive David Marcus said Tuesday in an interview on Bloomberg Television. Marcus leads F2, or Facebook Financial, the internal group developing the company's Novi digital wallet. That wallet could be used to hold NFTs, he said. "When you have a good crypto wallet like Novi will be, you also have to think about how to help consumers support NFTs," he added. "We're definitely thinking about this." He wasn't more specific about what kinds of NFT-related products Facebook might build.

Facebook's digital wallet is "ready now," Marcus said, but the company has been waiting to launch it until it can do so alongside Diem, the digital currency previously known as Libra, which Marcus co-founded from within Facebook in 2019. Plans are for Diem to offer a so-called stablecoin backed by the U.S. dollar, but it's unclear when the coin will be introduced. The project faced immense pushback from lawmakers and regulators when it was unveiled, and while Facebook is still a partner on the project, Diem is now run independently.

An anonymous reader writes: ISPs are quietly distributing "netflow" data that can, among other things, trace traffic through VPNs. There's something of an open secret in the cybersecurity world: internet service providers quietly give away detailed information about which computer is communicating with another to private businesses, which then sells access to that data to a range of third parties, according to multiple sources in the threat intelligence industry. The information, known as netflow data, is a useful tool for digital investigators. They can use it to identify servers being used by hackers, or to follow data as it is stolen. But the sale of this information still makes some people nervous because they are concerned about whose hands it may fall into. "I'm concerned that netflow data being offered for commercial purposes is a path to a dark fucking place," one source familiar with the data told Motherboard. Motherboard granted multiple sources anonymity to speak more candidly about industry issues.

On August 25, 1991, Linus Torvalds, then a student at the University of Helsinki in Finland, sent a message to the comp.os.minix newsgroup soliciting feature suggestions for a free Unix-like operating system he was developing as a hobby. Thirty years later, that software, now known as Linux, is everywhere. From a report: It dominates the supercomputer world, with 100 per cent market share. According to Google, the Linux kernel is at the heart of more than three billion active devices running Android, the most-used operating system in the world. Linux also powers the vast majority of web-facing servers Netcraft surveyed. It is even used more than Microsoft Windows on Microsoft's own Azure cloud. And then there are the embedded electronics and Internet-of-Things spaces, and other areas.

Linux has failed to gain traction among mainstream desktop users, where it has a market share of about 2.38 per cent, or 3.59 per cent if you include ChromeOS, compared to Windows (73.04 per cent) and macOS (15.43 per cent). But the importance of Linux has more to do with the triumph of an idea: of free, open-source software. "It cannot be overstated how critical Linux is to today's internet ecosystem," Kees Cook, security and Linux kernel engineer at Google, told The Register via email. "Linux currently runs on everything from the smartphone we rely on everyday to the International Space Station. To rely on the internet is to rely on Linux." The next 30 years of Linux, Cook contends, will require the tech industry to work together on security and to provide more resources for maintenance and testing.

The Federal Communications Commission has proposed a $5 million fine against right-wing activists Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman for allegedly making illegal robocalls discouraging mail voting ahead of the 2020 election. From a report: The record-setting penalty from the FCC comes as the pair faces criminal charges of voter suppression in Michigan and a federal lawsuit in New York accusing them of making 85,000 robocalls to Black Americans in an attempt to keep them from voting. The FCC says Wohl and Burkman made over 1,000 pre-recorded calls to wireless phones without receiving consent for those calls, in violation of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. The messages said if the voters cast their ballot by mail, their "personal information will be part of a public database that will be used by police departments to track down old warrants and be used by credit card companies to collect outstanding debts," according to an FCC news release.