Privacy

A few months on from a tracking controversy hitting privacy-centric search veteran, DuckDuckGo, the company has announced it’s been able to amend terms with Microsoft, its search syndication partner, that had previously meant its mobile browsers and browser extensions were prevented from bloc

A ruling put out yesterday by the European Union’s top court could have major implications for online platforms that use background tracking and profiling to target users with behavioral ads or to feed recommender engines that are designed to surface so-called ‘personalized’ conte

From Project Ara to Wave, Google has a rich history of bailing on neat ideas when the going gets tough. Yet unlike those forgone experiments, augmented-reality glasses apparently aren’t doomed to rest in Google’s metaphorical graveyard.  Instead, the advertising company is tip-toeing

TikTok has agreed to pause a controversial privacy policy update in Europe, which had been due to happen tomorrow, and would have meant the platform stopped asking users for their consent to be tracked to receive targeted advertising, technewss has learned. The Irish Data Protection Commission (DP

Research examining default settings and terms & conditions offered to minors by social media giants TikTok, WhatsApp and Instagram across 14 different countries — including the U.S., Brazil, Indonesia and the U.K. — has found the three platforms do not offer the same level of privac

An executive order signed by President Biden places the White House’s weight firmly behind states where access to abortion is guaranteed, urging the FTC and other executive entities to examine and reinforce data protection policies. Without a digital trail to follow, attempts to criminalize p

The U.K. government has tabled an amendment to the Online Safety Bill that could put it on a collision course with end-to-end encryption. It’s proposing to give the incoming internet regulator, Ofcom, new powers to force messaging platforms and other types of online services to implement cont

An independent review of UK legislation has concluded the country urgently needs new laws to govern the use of biometric technologies and called for the government to come forward with primary legislation. Among the legal review’s ten recommendations are that public use of live facial recogni

India will give VPN providers and cloud service operators an additional three months to comply with new rules that require they maintain names and addresses of their customers and their IP addresses, delivering some relief to firms as many scramble to follow the new guidelines and others explore ex

As Google works on reconfiguring its adtech stack to move away from cookie-based ad targeting to something else that’s not yet fixed but which it claims will be better for individual web users’ privacy — and after Apple’s move last year to lock down third-party tracking of a

NordVPN, one of the most popular VPN providers, is the latest to confirm that it will be removing its servers in India ahead of the nation enacting new strict guidelines later this month. The Lithuania-based firm, which counts General Catalyst and Novator among its backers and is valued at $1.6 bil

A major privacy feature Apple launched last year, called App Tracking Transparency (ATT) — which requires third-party apps to request permission from iOS users to track their digital activity for ad targeting — is facing another antitrust probe in Europe: Germany’s Federal Cartel Office (

U.S. law enforcement have announced the takedown of SSNDOB, a notorious marketplace used for trading the personal information — including Social Security numbers, or SSNs — of millions of Americans. The operation was conducted by the FBI, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Department of

India has withdrawn a warning that asked users to not share photocopies of their national biometric ID following a widespread uproar from users on social media, many of whom pointed out that this is the first time they were hearing about such a possibility. A regional office of UIDAI, the body that