Business

Business Insider reports: On Thursday, Google agreed to settle a $5 billion class-action privacy lawsuit alleging that it spied on people who used the “incognito” mode in its Chrome browser to track their internet use. The lawsuit filed in 2020 claimed Google misled users into believing that it wouldn’t track their internet activities while using incognito mode. The suit argued …

Reuters reports: Elon Musk’s X on Thursday failed to block a California state law that requires social media companies to publicly disclose how they moderate certain content on their platforms. X, formerly known as Twitter, in September sued California to undo the content moderation law, saying the law violated its free speech rights under the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment and …

The Associate Press reports: The NBA on Wednesday approved the sale of controlling interest of the Dallas Mavericks from Mark Cuban to the families that run the Las Vegas Sands casino company. The deal was approved just shy of a month after the families of Miriam Adelson and Sivan and Patrick Dumont announced their intention to buy the club. The …

Yahoo Finance reports: Apple can for now resume sales of its flagship smartwatches, after a U.S. appeals court on Wednesday paused a government commission’s import ban on the devices imposed in a patent dispute over its medical monitoring technology. The tech giant had filed an emergency request asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit to halt an …

The New York Times reports: The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement on Wednesday, opening a new front in the increasingly intense legal battle over the unauthorized use of published work to train artificial intelligence technologies. The Times is the first major American media organization to sue the companies, the creators of ChatGPT and other popular …

Axios reports: Apple filed an appeal Tuesday to the International Trade Commission’s decision to ban U.S. sales of Watch Series 9 and Watch Ultra 2 models. The emergency request came after the U.S. trade representative’s office said in a statement that it has declined to overturn the ban, which has now gone into effect. Masimo, a medical device company, claims …

Gothamist reports: New York cannabis officials will be handing out up to 1,445 new business licenses in the coming weeks, including at least 500 for dispensaries. Other licenses will go to marijuana growers, processors, wholesalers and microbusinesses after the application window for licenses closed earlier this month. In this new round, the state is prioritizing businesses that already have leases …

Reuters reports: Apple Watch import and sales to the U.S. are banned effective today after the Biden’s administration declined to veto a decision by the International Trade Commission. The ITC determined earlier this year that Apple uses a blood oxygen technology that infringes on patents held by Masimo. The government could have vetoed the ITC decision by December 25. The …

Axios reports: Americans send and receive more text messages on Christmas than any other day of the year, according to wireless carrier data shared with Axios. AT&T’s busiest day last year was Christmas. Group messages and photo or video messages were especially popular. It’s also the busiest day for T-Mobile, whose network saw 3 billion messages last year. Read the …

The Associated Press reports: Gift cards get lost or forgotten, or recipients hang on to them for a special occasion. In a July survey, the consumer finance company Bankrate found that 47% of U.S. adults had at least one unspent gift card or voucher with an average value of $18. That’s a total of $23 billion. Every year, big companies …

Florida Politics reports: Disney is suing its own government for records in the latest escalation in the long legal fight between The Walt Disney Company and Florida Republicans. Disney accused the state-controlled Disney board of taking months to respond to public records requests and self-selecting which records the board does release. Disney filed the lawsuit Friday, the last working day …

CNN Business reports: After three-plus years of prices steadily — and sometimes sharply — increasing month after month after month, they fell in November. Last month, for the first time since April 2020, prices fell on a monthly basis, according to a closely watched report released Friday by the Commerce Department. November’s Personal Consumption Expenditures price index, a comprehensive measure …

Reuters reports: Twitter violated contracts by failing to pay millions of dollars in bonuses that the social media company, now called X Corp, had promised its employees, a federal judge ruled on Friday. Mark Schobinger, who was Twitter’s senior director of compensation before leaving Elon Musk’s company in May, sued Twitter in June, claiming breach of contract. Schobinger’s suit alleged …

Reuter reports: Tesla is recalling 120,423 vehicles in the U.S. over the risk of cabin doors being unlocked during a crash, the country’s road safety regulator said on Friday, days after announcing another recall by the electric-vehicle maker. Tesla recalled over 2 million vehicles in the U.S. last week, its largest ever recall, covering nearly all of its vehicles on …

Bloomberg News reports: Hyperloop One, the futuristic transportation company building tube-encased lines to zip passengers and freight from city to city at airplane-like speeds, is shutting down. The company had captured the public’s imagination since its founding in 2014, a year after Elon Musk released a white paper outlining a vision for hyperloop technology. The concept was a tantalizing promise …

Reuters reports: Records and interviews reveal for the first time that the automaker has long known far more about the frequency and extent of the defects than it has disclosed to consumers and safety regulators. The documents, dated between 2016 and 2022, include repair reports from Tesla service centers globally; analyses and data reviews by engineers on parts with high …

NBC News reports: Parler, one of the Trump-era social media apps that featured little content moderation and became popular among conservatives, has been sold again and is planning for a relaunch early next year ahead of the 2024 presidential election, its new owners said Monday. The app, known for its use by participants in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, will …

The Washington Post reports: A U.S. inspection of a plant in Ecuador that manufactured pouches of contaminated applesauce linked to at least 125 cases of suspected lead poisoning in children found “extremely high” levels of the metal in a key ingredient: cinnamon. The Food and Drug Administration said Monday that samples of cinnamon from the plant that were tested contained …

CNET reports: Apple will pause sales of its Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 smartwatches in the US this month as the result of an ongoing legal battle with health tech company Masimo. The US International Trade Commission, the federal agency that handles trade-related mandates, previously issued an order that would prohibit Apple from importing the Series 9 and …

Politico reports: A trio of super PACs backed by cryptocurrency executives and investors said Monday that they’ve raised $78 million as part of a major new push to influence the 2024 elections. The campaign, which has support from venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz, U.S. crypto exchange Coinbase and Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, marks of a revival of the digital asset …