Privacy

The U.K. government’s post-Brexit appetite to “reform” domestic privacy rules by reducing the level of protections wrapping people’s data is already having wider ramifications for the country’s tech ecosystem. Last month the Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sp

China, the most populous nation in the world, passed its first significant data privacy legislation in August. Moving forward, any global business or aspiring startup doing any type of trade or offering services online likely will be affected because they'll be engaging with Chinese residents c

A U.K. law firm is bringing a class-action style claim over a patient health data scandal that dates back to 2015 and involves the Google-owned AI company DeepMind, after it was quietly passed medical information on more than a million patients by an NHS Trust as part of an app development project.

A coalition of digital marketing firms and others has taken its lobbying against Google’s plan to phase out tracking cookies — by replacing them with alternative technologies which the tech giant claims will protect user privacy — to the European Union, lodging a formal complaint

The U.K.’s competition watchdog has cleared Facebook’s acquisition of Kustomer, a maker of CRM tools. The purchase was announced last November — with a price tag we reported as $1 billion — but is pending closing after facing regulatory scrutiny. The U.K.R

The U.K. published its first-ever national AI strategy this week. The decade-long commitment by the government to levelling up domestic artificial intelligence capabilities — by directing resource and attention toward skills, talent, compute power and data access — has been broadly welc

Amazon’s biometric scanner for retail, the Amazon One palm reader, is expanding beyond the e-commerce giant’s own stores. The company announced today it has acquired its initial third-party customer with ticketing company AXS, which will implement the Amazon One system at Denver, Colora

Almost every American adult remembers, in vivid detail, where they were the morning of September 11, 2001. I was on the second floor of the West Wing of the White House, at a National Economic Council Staff meeting — and I will never forget the moment the Secret Service agent abruptly entered the

WhatsApp said on Friday it will give its two billion users the option to encrypt their chat backups to the cloud, taking a significant step to put a lid on one of the tricky ways private communication between individuals on the app can be compromised. The Facebook-owned service has end-to-end encry

China enacted a sweeping new data privacy law on August 20 that will dramatically impact how tech companies can operate in the country. Officially called the Personal Information Protection Law of the People's Republic of China (PIPL), the law is the first national data privacy statute passed i

The U.K. government is preparing to spend over half a million dollars to encourage the development of detection technologies for child sexual exploitation material (CSAM) that can be bolted on to end-to-end encrypted messaging platforms to scan for the illegal material, as part of its ongoing polic

In the latest quasi-throwback toward “do not track,” the U.K.’s data protection chief has come out in favor of a browser- and/or device-level setting to allow internet users to set “lasting” cookie preferences — suggesting this as a fix for the barrage of consent

The Federal Trade Commission has unanimously voted to ban the spyware maker SpyFone and its chief executive Scott Zuckerman from the surveillance industry, the first order of its kind, after the agency accused the company of harvesting mobile data on thousands of people and leaving it on the open i

It’s been a long time coming but Facebook is finally feeling some heat from Europe’s much trumpeted data protection regime: Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) has just announced a €225 million (~$267 million) fine for WhatsApp. The Facebook-owned messaging app has been u