Here are some stories we had our eye on today:

Apple and Facebook call for EU-style privacy laws in US
Financial Times, Mehreen Khan and Tim Bradshaw
Facebook and Apple have called on the US government to adopt tough EU-style data privacy laws, challenging White House objections that European regulation is imposing red tape on American technology businesses.  In separate addresses in Brussels on Wednesday, Apple’s chief executive Tim Cook and Erin Egan, Facebook’s privacy chief, threw their weight behind legislation that would give American citizens equivalent protections to those given to Europeans under the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation.

Why the world’s recycling system stopped working
Financial Times, Leslie Hook and John Reed
Using publicly available trade data, the FT has traced the exports of plastic and paper scrap from G7 countries, revealing a dramatic increase in the flows of waste into south-east Asia following the China ban. More than three dozen industry executives, policy makers, scrap traders and environmental advocates across the US, Europe and Asia were interviewed for this piece.  The investigation found an industry undergoing unprecedented disruption, with the very purpose of recycling thrown into question. While it has grown and often profited as consumers have become more aware of the environmental costs of landfill, the sector has long had an unsavoury side. This has been exposed by the National Sword policy, as an industry plagued by allegations of smuggling, corruption and pollution has suddenly been thrust into the spotlight.

Uber aims to be ‘Amazon of transportation’
Financial Times, Shannon Bond
Only a handful of global technology companies can claim a billion people use their products. But Uber wants to join the club. Chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi said this week that the San Francisco company is aiming to reach 1bn active passengers, drivers and food delivery customers, compared to about 100m today. Two years ago, the company had just 40m passengers using its rides business. But now, as Uber prepares for a blockbuster initial public offering next year, Mr Khosrowshahi is laying out an ambitious pitch for the future where the company becomes the middleman for everything from shared rides and electric bikes to public buses and subways. “We want to invest very, very significantly in pool technology and mass transit, and we want to take that 100m to a billion,” he said at a Financial Times event in London on Monday.

'City of surveillance': privacy expert quits Toronto's smart-city project
The Guardian, Gabrielle Canon
When it was announced last year that a district in Toronto would be handed over to a company hoping to build a model for new tech-driven smart city, critics were quick to voice concerns. Despite Justin Trudeau’s exclamation that, through a partnership with Google’s sister company Sidewalk Labs, the waterfront neighborhood could help turn the area into a “thriving hub for innovation”, questions immediately arose over how the new wired town would collect and protect data. A year into the project, those questions have resurfaced following the resignation of a privacy expert, Dr Ann Cavoukian, who claimed she left her consulting role on the initiative to “send a strong statement” about the data privacy issues the project still faces.

OPINION

The U.S. has lost its entrepreneurial advantage
The Washington Post, Robert Samuelson
For decades, promoting start-up firms through venture capital and other methods of business investment seemed a peculiarly American strength. It has nurtured countless tech firms, including titans such as Facebook, Google and Apple. Americans have been duly proud. It reinforced a sense of national exceptionalism, because other countries couldn’t easily duplicate it, if at all. No more. A new study shows that the United States’ capacity to foster high-tech firms is increasingly emulated abroad. The U.S. monopoly on entrepreneurship has been broken and almost certainly can’t be restored. American venture capitalists are investing in foreign start-ups, and foreign investors are pouring money into U.S. start-ups.