High-speed jobs: A new study suggests that better broadband service lowers unemployment rates, Vice.com reports. Researchers from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and Oklahoma State University tracked broadband availability and unemployment rates in Tennessee and found that counties with access to high-speed broadband had a slightly lower unemployment rate than those with slower service.
More moderation: YouTube plans to remove white supremacist, hate speech and hoax videos, the Washington Post reports. The new policy will go farther than YouTube’s former prohibition on videos that promote violence or hatred against people based on their age, religious beliefs, gender, religion, immigration status and sexual orientation.
Encryption fight: Yandex, a provider of Internet-related services in Russia and the former Soviet Union, has reached an agreement with the Russian FSB security service on handing over encryption keys, Reuters reports. Details of the agreement weren’t immediately available. Yandex had originally resisted the FSB’s demand for encryption keys, Reuters says.
Bigger than the weather: U.S. residents believe fake news is a bigger problem than climate change or racism, according to a new survey detailed at Business Insider. Half of those surveyed said made-up news is a major problem, while just 46 said the same thing of climate change.
Medical leaks: A medical records breach at the collections firm American Medical Collection Agency has compromised the data of 12 million Quest Diagnostics patients and 7.7 LabCorp patients, USA Today reports. In addition to medical data, Social Security numbers and financial data were breached as well, leaving patients susceptible to financial fraud.
Privacy now! The New York legislature is pushing a data privacy bill that would be among the strictest in the United States, Wired.com reports. The bill would require businesses to put their customers’ privacy before their own profits, and it would be tougher than a recent California data privacy bill that some Internet companies are trying to amend.
Encryption is under threat around the world. It’s up to each of us to take action.