Privacy

Meta reached a $1.4 billion settlement with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on Tuesday to settle a 2-year-old lawsuit related to the company’s use of facial recognition software. “After vigorously pursuing justice for our citizens whose privacy rights were violated by Meta's use of f

U.S. airports are rolling out facial-recognition technology to scan the faces of travelers before they board their flight. Americans, at least, get to opt out.  More than 230 U.S. airports have already rolled out facial-recognition technology, according to the website of the U.S. Customs and Bord

The world of online advertising has changed dramatically since Ghostery first launched in 2009 to help people understand and block all the ways that advertisers were tracking them. Since then, Ghostery and ad blocking at large have attracted a significant user base. (In Ghostery’s case, the

Italy’s competition and consumer watchdog has announced an investigation into how Google gets users’ consent in order to link their activity across different services for ad profiling, saying it suspects the adtech giant of “unfair commercial practices.” At issue here is ho

It’s shaping up to be a terrible, no good, really bad news month for the company formerly known as Twitter. Elon Musk’s X has just been hit with a first clutch of grievances by the European Union for suspected breaches of the bloc’s Digital Services Act — an online governanc

The EU Digital Identity Wallet is an ambitious project by the European Union that’s still a bit under the radar but worth paying attention to, as it could deliver big things in the next few years.  The goal is to set up a universal digital identity system for citizens. If all goes to plan,

A controversial European Union legislative proposal to scan the private messages of citizens in a bid to detect child sexual abuse material (CSAM) is a risk to the future of web security, Meredith Whittaker warned in a public blog post Monday. She’s the president of the not-for-profit foundat

LinkedIn has confirmed it will no longer allow advertisers to target users based on data gleaned from their participation in LinkedIn Groups. The move comes more than three months after a collective of civil society groups filed a complaint with the European Commission (EC) over a potential violat

A data protection taskforce that’s spent over a year considering how the European Union’s data protection rulebook applies to OpenAI’s viral chatbot, ChatGPT, reported preliminary conclusions Friday. The top-line takeaway is that the working group of privacy enforcers remains unde

Apple released new data about anti-fraud measures related to its operation of the iOS App Store on Tuesday morning, trumpeting a claim that it stopped over $7 billion in “potentially fraudulent transactions” across the four years between 2020 and 2023. More than $1.8 billion of that to

OpenAI is facing another privacy complaint in the European Union. This one, which has been filed by privacy rights nonprofit noyb on behalf of an individual complainant, targets the inability of its AI chatbot ChatGPT to correct misinformation it generates about individuals. The tendency of GenAI t

Dating apps are not following great privacy practices and are collecting more data than ever in order to woo Gen Z users, a new study by Mozilla pointed out. Researchers reviewed dating apps in terms of privacy in 2021. In the latest report, they noted that dating apps have become more data-hungry

In the latest iteration of the never-ending (and always head-scratching) crypto wars, Graeme Biggar, the director general of the U.K.’s National Crime Agency (NCA), has called on Instagram’s parent, Meta, to rethink its continued rollout of end-to-end encryption (E2EE). The call follows

Incoming guidance by an expert steering body on European Union data protection law could have major implications for Meta’s advertising business model. The European Data Protection Board (EDPB) has decided that large platforms such as Facebook and Instagram cannot force a “binary”