Author: Julie Campbell

The Department of Homeland Security is warning travelers about new scrutiny over electronic devices.

There has now been a caution issued by the Department of Homeland Security for travelers, which has stated that new tighter regulations for electronic and mobile technology will be going into place in airports that have flights that are headed directly into the United States.

So far, the department hasn’t gone on to provide a great deal of detail about what those changes will entail.

Earlier this week, security officials added to the department’s earlier statement by saying that the focus is being placed primarily on identifying explosives that could be hidden in the form of electronic and mobile technology devices, such as a cell phone. The Transportation Security Administration followed up by issuing a statement that said that a part of its typical screening routine at the overseas airports that have flights that head directly to the united states will include a potential request for device owners to turn them on.

Therefore, it is important not to bring mobile technology with dead batteries onto those flights.

This can include everything from laptops to cell phones and pretty much everything in between. If a smartphone, tablet, laptop, or other device, cannot be turned on, then they will not be permitted onto the flights, said the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). Travelers with devices that have dead batteries or that cannot be turned on for some other reason may also be subject to additional forms of screening, such as pat-downs.

Homeland Security secretary, Jeh Johnson, said that “In this instance, we felt that it was important to crank it up some at the last point-of-departure airports.” Johnson added that “we’ll continually evaluate the situation.”

Johnson explained that this latest change in policies is working to help to stop the next form of attack from happening in the first place, instead of reacting to one that has already occurred. However, he also said that there is no reason to speculate about upcoming attacks. “We know that there remains a terrorist threat to the United States,” he said, adding that “aviation security is a large part of that.”

So far, there has been little objection from the public that has been heard regarding the announcement regarding electronics and mobile technology checks.

The highly controversial “emotional contagion” study has led a digital privacy group to file a complaint with the FTC.

A digital privacy group is now landing Facebook with some negative social media marketing as it filed a complaint with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC), with a request that those regulators look into the psychological experiments that were conducted on some of the users of the social network in 2012, without their knowledge or direct permission.

Facebook did not obtain permission before it went ahead with the social media research on user profiles.

The study altered the number of negative and positive comments in the news feeds that were seen by about 700,000 members of the site, said the Electronic Privacy Information Center’s complaint. This study has already created quite a stir and has drawn a lot of negative social media marketing attention to the network giant. The privacy group stated that sanctions should be imposed, including those that would require Facebook to disclose the formulas used within its software for determining the way in which the posts displayed in user news feeds are chosen.

Social media marketing for the company appears to have backfired, somewhat, as a result of the experiment.

The complaint filed to the FTC explained that “the company purposefully messed with people’s minds.” It also pointed out that the company made no attempt to advise the users of the social network that their data would be shared with the third party researchers for this or any other purpose.

The report that resulted from the experiment was published within the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in its June 17 edition and has been generating a massive amount of controversy since that time. It has exploded the concerns that had already been rising regarding the data privacy practices at Facebook within the United States as well as in other countries.

Last week, the U.K. Information Commissioner’s Office released a statement that generated additional negative social media marketing for Facebook when it said that it wished to work with the company and the Irish Data Commissioner – the lead regulator for the company in Europe – in order to gain more information regarding the circumstances of the data collection and use.