Tag Archives: privacy

Ars Technica reports: Apple has agreed to pay $95 million to settle a lawsuit alleging that its voice assistant Siri routinely recorded private conversations that were then sold to third parties for targeted ads. In the proposed class-action settlement—which comes after five years of litigation—Apple admitted to no wrongdoing. Instead, the settlement refers to “unintentional” Siri activations that occurred after …

Reuters reports: The U.S. Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit Friday against TikTok and parent company ByteDance for failing to protect children’s privacy on the social media app. The government said TikTok violated a law that prohibits collecting, using, or disclosing personal information from children under 13 without parental consent. The DOJ said TikTok knowingly permitted children …

CNBC reports: Meta agreed to pay a record $1.4 billion to settle a lawsuit by the state of Texas over the Facebook owner’s unauthorized use of biometric data by users, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said Tuesday. The suit, filed by Paxton in February 2022, accused Meta of capturing and using the biometric data of millions of Texas residents — …

ABC News reports: European Union regulators accused social media company Meta Platforms on Monday of breaching the bloc’s new digital competition rulebook by forcing Facebook and Instagram users to choose between seeing ads or paying to avoid them. Meta began giving European users the option in November of paying for ad-free versions of Facebook and Instagram as a way to …

The Associated Press reports: Florida has more than 700,000 medical marijuana patients and Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis — who is battling a proposal to allow recreational use of marijuana — wants them all to know what a great job he’s doing. The Department of Health last week sent a blast email to its medical marijuana patient list boasting that DeSantis …

Reuters reports: Gay dating app Grindr is facing a mass data protection lawsuit in London from hundreds of users who allegedly had their private information, including HIV status, shared with third parties without consent, a law firm said on Monday. Austen Hays, which said the lawsuit is being filed at London’s High Court, said thousands of Grindr users in the …

Via press release from Airbnb: Airbnb is banning the use of indoor security cameras in listings globally as part of efforts to simplify our policy on security cameras and other devices and to continue to prioritize the privacy of our community. Historically, Airbnb allowed the use of indoor security cameras in common areas of listings, such as hallways and living …

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 …

Ars Technica reports: Genetic profiling service 23andMe has commenced an investigation after private user data was been scraped off its website.  Friday’s confirmation comes five days after an unknown entity took to an online crime forum to advertise the sale of private information for millions of 23andMe users. The forum posts claimed that the stolen data included origin estimation, phenotype, …

Today’s news about TikTok being fined by the European Union reminded me to give you a heads-up that this here website thingy will soon comply with a recent Google edict related to the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). All US-based sites that carry Google ads must issue a statement regarding privacy and personal data collection. A new message on …

The Guardian reports: TikTok has been fined €345m (£296m) for breaking EU data law in its handling of children’s accounts, including failing to shield underage users’ content from public view. The Irish data watchdog, which regulates TikTok across the EU, said the Chinese-owned video app had committed multiple breaches of GDPR rules. It found TikTok had contravened GDPR by placing …

CNBC reports: Meta has been fined a record 1.2 billion euro ($1.3 billion) by European privacy regulators over the transfer of EU user data to the U.S. The decision links back to a case brought by Austrian privacy campaigner Max Schrems who argued that the framework for transferring EU citizen data to America did not protect Europeans from U.S. surveillance. …

Reuters reports: Tesla Inc assures its millions of electric car owners that their privacy “is and will always be enormously important to us.” The cameras it builds into vehicles to assist driving, it notes on its website, are “designed from the ground up to protect your privacy.” But between 2019 and 2022, groups of Tesla employees privately shared via an …

Reuters reports: Facebook owner Meta Platforms has agreed to pay $725 million to resolve a class-action lawsuit accusing the social media giant of allowing third parties, including Cambridge Analytica, to access users’ personal information. The proposed settlement would resolve a long-running lawsuit prompted by revelations in 2018 that Facebook had allowed Cambridge Analytica to access data of as many as …

CNBC reports: Epic Games, the developer and publisher of the video game Fortnite, will pay $520 million in fines to settle with the FTC over violations of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). The FTC had alleged that Epic paired children and teens “with strangers,” exposed them to “dangerous and psychologically traumatizing issues,” and failed to introduce adequate parental …

The Washington Post reports: Several top privacy and security executives resigned from Twitter on Thursday, citing fears over the risks from Elon Musk’s leadership, a stunning exodus that prompted federal regulators to warn they might step in. Chief Information Security Officer Lea Kissner tweeted Thursday morning that they had made the “hard decision” to resign, and the company’s chief privacy …

The New York Times reports: Meta was fined roughly $400 million for breaking European Union data privacy laws for its treatment of children’s data on Instagram, the latest in a series of steps by authorities in Europe and the United States to crack down on what information is collected and shared by companies about young people online. European laws give …

Via press release from the FTC: The Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit against data broker Kochava Inc. for selling geolocation data from hundreds of millions of mobile devices that can be used to trace the movements of individuals to and from sensitive locations. Kochava’s data can reveal people’s visits to reproductive health clinics, places of worship, homeless and domestic …

Ars Technica reports: Four Democratic US senators today asked the Federal Trade Commission to “investigate Apple and Google for engaging in unfair and deceptive practices by enabling the collection and sale of hundreds of millions of mobile phone users’ personal data.” The letter cited the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, saying that women “seeking abortions and other reproductive …

Ars Technica reports: A tracking tool installed on many hospitals’ websites has been collecting patients’ sensitive health information—including details about their medical conditions, prescriptions, and doctor’s appointments—and sending it to Facebook. The Markup tested the websites of Newsweek’s top 100 hospitals in America. On 33 of them we found the tracker, called the Meta Pixel, sending Facebook a packet of …