The European Union wants to enhance the power of the bloc's national privacy regulators in policing a planned new EU-U.S. data pact after the previous one was struck down by a top EU court on concerns about mass U.S. surveillance. Brussels and Washington are locked in negotiations to forge a new framework enabling data transfers from Europe to the United States, which are otherwise subject to cumbersome and lengthy legal processes under EU data protection law.
Copyright laws don’t shield a major Internet provider from liability for illegal music downloading by its subscribers, according to a ruling in a closely watched case between cable company Cox Communications Inc. and two music publishers. The ruling, by U.S. District Judge Liam O’Grady in Alexandria, Va., could open the door to more downloading lawsuits against the cable industry by movie studios and music publishers, according to some legal experts.
VTech, a Chinese company that makes popular electronic toys for kids, had its app store hacked. An "unauthorized party" accessed customer information in a database for VTech's Learning Lodge app store on November 14, the company said in a statement.
The Federal Communications Commission has hired Jonathan Mayer, a rising star in privacy circles, to serve as its technical lead for investigations into telephone, television and Internet service providers. He will work primarily on consumer protection issues, especially those having to do with security and privacy, agency spokeswoman Shannon Gilson confirmed.
Texas halted dating service Lone Star Introductions and others from operating in the state because it said the firms had harassed and threatened clients, the Attorney General's office said. A state district court issued an injunction that calls on the dating service and affiliated dating sites, including eLove Matchmaking, International Dating Ventures and International Introductions, to cease operations in the state.
Alphabet Inc.'s Google said it has evaluated more than 1.2 million Web pages for compliance with Europe’s “Right to Be Forgotten” ruling, and removed 42% of them from its search results. Facebook Inc.'s domain was the top one affected by link removals.
The number of piracy takedown requests sent to Google is continuing to balloon: The search giant now receives around 2.2 million demands every single day. According to new data published by Google on Sunday as part of its Transparency Report, it received 66,318,159 "URLs Requested to be removed" over the last month.
Cyber attacks on the private sector are an increasingly important risk in corporate credit analysis, U.S. ratings agency Moody’s Investors Service said. The threat of computer hacking varies from sector to sector and remains hard to measure because intrusions often go undetected or are not publicly disclosed, Moody’s said.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has teamed up with data and design company Visualizing Impact to launch onlinecensorship.org, which collects and tracks content takedown requests.The site collects user-submitted reports of "erroneously or unjustly removed" content and writes reports about these takedown practices (in addition to featuring certain individual takedown stories).
Austrian student Max Schrems's attempt to bring a class-action lawsuit against Facebook over its privacy policies will head to Austria's Supreme Court to determine whether such collective legal action is allowed, his group said. The law student has claimed 500 euros ($531) in damages each for the more than 25,000 signatories to his lawsuit -- the latest in a series of European challenges to U.S. technology firms and their handling of personal data.
A political candidate sued to identify the author of an unusual comment on a newspaper's website. After $35,000 in legal fees, the Illinois Supreme Court ruled Comcast had to give up its subscriber's info and the name was finally made public.
Domain name overseer ICANN has spent $2.5 million in the past year lobbying the U.S. government, putting the small non-profit on a par with multi-national corporations. The figure is five times larger than the organization has previously admitted to.
When T-Mobile announced its new Binge On perk, which lets you stream video on your mobile device without it eating into any of your allotted data, advocates for an open Internet were quick to voice concerns. Now, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler has weighed in, and it turns out he has no problem with Binge On. In fact, he actually supports it.
Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc. said hackers stole customer credit-card and debit-card information during a data breach that lasted for nearly eight months and affected 54 locations, including a number of luxury properties. The company said that malicious software, known as malware, infiltrated payment systems at in-hotel restaurants and gift shops, collecting customer names, card numbers, security codes and expiration dates.
Oracle Corp. says it can’t get a fair shake from an economics professor serving as a damages expert in its billion-dollar court battle with Google over the Java platform. Oracle claims James Kearl, a Brigham Young University professor, showed himself to be partial to Google when he testified last year for Samsung Electronics Co.
A U.S. jury found Apple Inc. did not infringe five antipiracy patents owned by a Pendrell Corp. subsidiary at trial in a Texas federal court. The jury also found that Apple did not prove that the patents were invalid.
Facebook Inc. executives met with Belgian privacy regulators to offer a more detailed defense of its practice of collecting data on nonusers in the country, in the wake of a court ruling there that it must halt the practice. The Belgian Privacy Commission brought the case against Facebook in June, accusing the company of raking in personal data of users as well as nonmembers, without asking for consent or adequately explaining how the data would be used.
Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp will issue an alert formally notifying more than 6 million Georgia voters that their personal information, including Social Security numbers and birth dates, were illegally released last month by his office. The decision to send the notification comes two days after his office was alerted to the problem by two voters who filed a class action lawsuit alleging a massive data breach. The notification is also required by state law.
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton urged social media companies to help shut down the radicalization and recruitment happening online in a speech outlining her strategy for combatting the Islamic State after the Paris terror attacks. The former U.S. Secretary of State said private social media companies should assist in this effort by swiftly shutting down terrorist accounts so they cannot be used to “plan, provoke or celebrate violence.”
The hacking collective Anonymous declared digital war on the Islamic State militant group in response to last week’s attacks in Paris. The announcement struck some as odd given the group’s history of targeting Western governments and corporations, and its affinity for anarchism.
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