Jay Edelson's class-action law firm started suing technology companies in the early 2000s, before data privacy was a national debate. Mr. Edelson claims to have won more than $1 billion in settlements in all, a number that is difficult to confirm because many of those agreements are private.
The European Union is weighing a major investigation into how Internet platforms like Google Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. operate in Europe, amid concerns that such companies have too much power over smaller firms . The investigation, proposed in an internal EU discussion paper seen by The Wall Street Journal, comes amid a flurry of other probes into various U.S. tech companies, whose dominance of Europe’s online landscape is causing deep concern in top policy circles.
Samsung convinced U.S. regulators to review whether two of Smartflash’s patents should have been issued in the first place. If a review board at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office tosses those patents, it will not only benefit Samsung but also Apple -- the company it spent four years battling over smartphone technology on four continents.
Apple is not able to launch its new smartwatch in Switzerland until at least the end of this year because of an intellectual property rights issue, Swiss broadcaster RTS reported on its website. The U.S. tech giant cannot use the image of an apple nor the word "apple" to launch its watch within Switzerland, the home of luxury watches, because of a patent from 1985, RTS reported, citing a document from the Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property.
Plaintiffs in an antitrust lawsuit against Google Inc. withdrew their case accusing the search engine company of harming smartphone buyers by forcing handset makers using Android operating system to make Google's own applications the default option. The lawsuit argued that Google requires Android handset manufacturers such as Samsung Electronics Co Ltd. favor Google's apps such as YouTube and restrict competing apps like Microsoft Corp's Bing search.
In a first-of-its-kind prosecution, the convicted operator of a “revenge porn” website was sentenced to nearly 18 years in prison, officials announced. Kevin Christopher Bollaert, 28, of San Diego, was found guilty in February on six counts of extortion and 21 counts of identity theft for running a website that posted nude photos of individuals, as well as identifying information, without their consent, according to Attorney General Kamala Harris.
The video streaming service Hulu has prevailed against a legal challenge claiming that it violated its users' privacy by sharing what they watched on Facebook. A federal judge ruled that the company did not “knowingly” send information to Facebook to pair up with users’ profiles and distribute online.
More than three dozen technology-industry executives issued a joint statement urging lawmakers to enact legislation protecting gays and lesbians from discrimination, responding to controversial religious-freedom measures in states such as Indiana and Arkansas.The statement, organized by PayPal co-founder Max Levchin and released on the website of the Human Rights Campaign, was signed by executives such as Salesforce.com Inc. Chief Executive Officer Marc Benioff, Twitter Inc. CEO Dick Costolo, EBay Inc. CEO John Donahoe and Sequoia Capital Chairman Michael Moritz.
China's bank technology restrictions and a draft anti-terrorism law may run counter to the country's international trade commitments, the U.S. Trade Representative said in a report. The U.S. trade office's regular review of telecommunications trade continued the pressure over initiatives that have upset U.S. industry groups and that the Obama administration has also raised at the highest level with Chinese counterparts.
Europe’s competition regulator is preparing to move against Google Inc. in the next few weeks, a person familiar with the matter said, setting the stage for charges against the U.S. Internet-search giant in a five-year-old investigation that has stalled three times and sparked a political firestorm. The European Commission, the European Union’s top antitrust authority, has been asking companies that filed complaints against Google for permission to publish some information they previously submitted confidentially, according to several people familiar with the requests.
Uber has filed complaints with Brussels against Spain and Germany over their bans on the mobile phone taxi-hailing service, ramping up the U.S. company's battle against legal challenges across Europe. The European Commission confirmed it had received a complaint against a German ban on Uber offering its unlicensed services.
President Obama signed an executive order establishing the first sanctions program to allow the administration to impose penalties on individuals overseas who engage in destructive attacks or commercial espionage in cyberspace. In the works for two years, the order declares “significant malicious cyber-enabled activities” a “national emergency” and enables the treasury secretary to target foreign individuals and entities that take part in the illicit cyberactivity for sanctions that could include freezing their financial assets and barring commercial transactions with them.
The latest sign of growing global concerns over cybersecurity: Singapore has established a new ministry to combat bad guys lurking in the Internet’s shadows. The wealthy city-state opened the Cyber Security Agency of Singapore, or CSA, a new body that will focus on national cybersecurity strategies.
The U.S. International Trade Commission has decided to investigate Apple after two complaints from Ericsson that the iPhone maker violated its patents. The companies have been fighting since the start of the year when a license agreement covering Apple’s use of Ericsson patents on LTE high-speed wireless technology expired.
The U.S. government charged that in the shadows of an undercover investigation of Silk Road, a notorious black-market site, two federal agents sought to enrich themselves by exploiting the very secrecy that made the site so difficult for law enforcement officials to penetrate. The agents, Carl Mark Force IV, who worked for the Drug Enforcement Administration, and Shaun W. Bridges, who worked for the Secret Service, had resigned amid growing scrutiny, and they were charged with money laundering and wire fraud.
China has agreed to delay implementing new bank technology restrictions that Washington has complained represent unfair regulatory pressure on foreign firms, a senior U.S. Treasury official said in Beijing. China said this month work was ongoing on a draft anti-terrorism law that would require foreign companies to hand over encryption keys and otherwise facilitate Beijing's ability to bypass security measures, triggering U.S. protests.
Google has lost a Court of Appeal bid to stop consumers having the right to sue in the UK over alleged misuse of privacy settings.A group of users claim that Google bypassed security settings on the Safari browser to install tracking cookies on their computers in order to target them with advertising.
Letting EU citizens watch movies online anywhere and simplifying cross-border e-commerce are key European Commission efforts to unify the continent’s digital market. The Commission agreed how to proceed with its European Digital Single Market plan and identified priorities to be detailed in May.
Thousands of Uber users account credentials could have been compromised, and are up for sale from unscrupulous sellers. At least two separate vendors on dark web marketplace AlphaBay are hawking active Uber accounts, Motherboard reports.
Quebec plans to order Internet providers to block unlicensed gambling websites that sap its revenues, raising questions about government interference with the Web for financial gain. In its budget, the province said it plans to propose new legislation that would compel Internet service providers (ISPs) to block access to a list of gambling websites drawn up by Loto-Québec.
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