Three plaintiffs from California, Colorado and Wisconsin filed a lawsuit against San Francisco-based Fitbit, claiming its Charge HR and Surge models significantly underestimated their heart rates during workouts. The lawsuit, which claims the company falsely advertised the wrist-bound monitors, is seeking compensatory and punitive damages.
Micro-blogging site Twitter filed a lawsuit in an Ankara court, seeking to annul a fine by the Turkish authorities for not removing content Turkey says is "terrorist propaganda", a source familiar with the case told Reuters. A Turkish official said much of the material in question was related to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) which Ankara deems as a terrorist organization.
Uber Technologies Inc. agreed to pay $20,000 and impose stricter controls on how it handles sensitive user data to settle an investigation by New York’s attorney general of its privacy practices. The probe began after an executive made comments suggesting the company could tap into its data to track the whereabouts of specific riders.
Amid the euphoria over connected devices at CES in Las Vegas, Federal Trade Commission Chairwoman Edith Ramirez injected a note of caution. Ramirez said the proliferation of Internet-connected gadgets — from home thermostats to fitness bands to scores of other products on display — raises concerns about the personal information that is being collected, how it’s being used and whether it is adequately secured.
The chairwoman of the Federal Trade Commission said that negotiators were “well on our way” to reaching a new agreement governing how American companies can store data belonging to Europeans. “In my mind, I’m optimistic that we’re going to be able to find a solution to this, I’m hoping by the end of this month,” she said while appearing at the trade show CES. “But we’re well on our way I think to doing that.”
Despite pressure to reform what has been variously described as its misogynist, racist and bullying nature — Yik Yak, the anonymous, localized free messaging app, remains the rage on college campuses across the country. But one lawyer, Debra S. Katz, and others who abhor what Yik Yak permits are hopeful that Ms. Katz’s formal complaint last May to the Department of Education against the University of Mary Washington over a Yik Yak-related episode — and a pending investigation by the department’s Office of Civil Rights — might signal the beginning of the end for the social media upstart that has outraged feminists, racial justice advocates and others in its relatively brief existence.
Time Warner Cable Inc said up to 320,000 customers may have had their email passwords stolen. The company said email and password details were likely gathered either through malware downloaded during phishing attacks or indirectly through data breaches of other companies that stored Time Warner Cable's customer information, including email addresses.
Turkey will not give up on its demand for micro-blogging site Twitter to pay a 150,000 lira ($50,000) fine for not removing content it says is "terrorist propaganda" and will take measures after the period to pay the fine expired, Transport Minister Binali Yildirim said.
German publishers have filed a complaint against Google in a row over whether or not the search engine should pay the publishers to show their articles online, a spokesman for VG Media -- a consortium of around 200 publishers -- told Reuters.
A Chinese regulator said that it would open a new antitrust investigation of Microsoft, related to electronic data that the government collected in an earlier inquiry. Despite Microsoft’s recent steps to improve relations with the Chinese government, the announcement is a reminder of the regulatory challenges that multinational companies face in the country, one of the world’s largest technology and consumer markets.
Yahoo Inc. was ordered by a Chicago federal judge to face a class action lawsuit accusing the Internet company of sending unsolicited text messages to Sprint Corp cellphone users in violation of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. U.S. District Judge Manish Shah said the users could sue as a group over messages sent in March 2013 because their claims had enough in common.
The Authors Guild has officially asked the Supreme Court to hear its case against Google — a long-running dispute over whether copyright law allows for Google to scan and post excerpts from books for its Google Books service. Google's free service allows users to search for particular lines or quotes in books through the company's main search engine, and also displays parts of scanned pages of books.
Back in 2010, the Federal Trade Commission pledged to give Internet users the power to determine if or when websites were allowed to track their behavior. But five years out, the same agency whose Do Not Call initiative failed to stop unwanted telemarketing calls once again has little to show for its efforts, this time to control tracking on the Web.
The blog OnSmash was among music sites shut down in 2010, accused of copyright infringement and selling counterfeit goods. But a few weeks ago, after lobbying the government for its return and paying a $7 fee, Kevin Hofman — a rank-and-file record label employee who ran OnSmash, first as a hobby and later as a full-time job — finally got it back, with little explanation and without ever being formally charged with any wrongdoing.
Brian Krebs, a famed cybersecurity journalist whose reporting on hacking and the dark side of the Internet has angered some, and he's a now a frequent target of fraudsters and cybercriminals. Krebs was targeted again on Christmas Eve, he says in a blog post — when someone broke into his PayPal account and tried to send money to ISIS.
New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman filed a lawsuit seeking that FanDuel and DraftKings return all money won by the fantasy-sports sites in New York state, officials confirmed. Mr. Schneiderman is asking that the money be returned to the users who lost it and that the sites pay a fine up to $5,000 a case.
BlackBerry Ltd said it has decided to continue its operations in Pakistan as the government dropped a request for access to users' data. The company, which has faced similar problems in the past in India, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia, had said last month it would delay shutting down its operations in Pakistan until Dec. 30.
Ukraine will investigate a suspected cyber attack on its power grid, the energy ministry said, an incident the country's secret service has blamed on Russia. A power company in western Ukraine, Prykarpattyaoblenergo, said on Dec. 23 that a swath of the area it serves had been left without energy, including the regional capital Ivano-Frankivsk, due to "interference" in the work of the system.
All the BBC's websites were unavailable early on New Year's eve morning because of a large web attack. Sources within the BBC said the sites were offline thanks to what is known as a "distributed denial of service" attack.
Microsoft Corp. said it will begin warning users of its Outlook.com email service when the company suspects that a government has been trying to hack into their accounts. Microsoft told Reuters about the plan in a statement. It comes nine days after Reuters asked the company why it had decided not tell victims of a hacking campaign, discovered in 2011, that had targeted international leaders of China's Tibetan and Uighur minorities in particular.
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