Spanish regulators slapped Facebook with a $1.4 million fine over how it collects personal information on its users. The Spanish Data Protection Agency said that it found three cases of Facebook collecting information on ideology, sex, religious beliefs, personal tastes and browser history without properly notifying users what the data was being obtained for.
Chinese authorities are ordering domestic bitcoin exchanges to shut down, delivering a heavy blow to once-thriving trading hubs that helped popularize the virtual currency pushing it to recent record highs. China’s central bank, working with other regulators, has drafted instructions banning Chinese platforms from providing virtual currency trading services, according to people familiar with the matter.
Startups hoping to sell health tracking devices and software to corporate customers are worried European regulators will torpedo their business model. Employers should be banned from issuing workers with wearable fitness monitors, such as Fitbit, or other health tracking devices, even with the employees’ permission, a European Union advisory panel said in June.
Google appealed against a record 2.4-billion-euro ($2.9 billion) EU antitrust fine, with its chances of success boosted by Intel’s partial victory last week against another EU sanction. The world’s most popular Internet search engine, a unit of the U.S. firm Alphabet, launched its appeal two months after it was fined by the European Commission for abusing its dominance in Europe by giving prominent placement in searches to its comparison shopping service and demoting rival offerings.
An investigation by The New York Times, and new research from the cybersecurity firm FireEye, reveals some of the mechanisms by which suspected Russian operators used Twitter and Facebook to spread anti-Clinton messages and promote the hacked material they had leaked. On Twitter, as on Facebook, Russian fingerprints are on hundreds or thousands of fake accounts that regularly posted anti-Clinton messages.
France, Germany, Italy and Spain want digital multinationals like Amazon and Google to be taxed in Europe based on their revenues, rather than only profits as now, their finance ministers said in a joint letter.France is leading a push to clamp down on the taxation of such companies, but has found support from other countries also frustrated at the low tax they receive under current international rules.
Best Buy is pulling internet security software from a Russian company off its shelves and from its website amid outside concerns that Kaspersky Lab could have links to the Russian government.The decision was prompted by media reports, congressional testimony and industry discussion raising questions about Moscow-based Kaspersky, a respected cybersecurity firm.
The U.S. Congress plans to probe a massive data breach at the credit-monitoring service Equifax that compromised roughly 143 million Americans’ most sensitive information. Two panels of lawmakers each announced they planned to grill the company at an upcoming hearing, the date of which the committees did not share.
Equifax, which supplies credit information and other information services, said that a data breach could have potentially affected 143 million consumers in the United States. The company said the exposed data include names, birth dates, Social Security numbers, addresses and some driver's license numbers, all of which Equifax aims to protect for its customers.
Thousands of UK companies were at risk of having their .uk domain names stolen for more than four months by a critical security failure at domain registrar Enom. The security lapse allowed .uk domains to be transferred between Enom accounts with no verification, authorization or logs.
European Union defense ministers tested their ability to respond to a potential attack by computer hackers in their first cyber war game, based on a simulated attack on one of the bloc’s military missions abroad. In the simulation, hackers sabotaged the EU’s naval mission in the Mediterranean and launched a campaign on social media to discredit the EU operations and provoke protests.
A federal judge in Massachusetts has dismissed a libel lawsuit against tech news website Techdirt. The claim was brought by Shiva Ayyadurai, who has controversially claimed that he invented e-mail in the late 1970s.
Representatives of Facebook told congressional investigators that it has discovered it sold ads during the U.S. presidential election to a shadowy Russian company seeking to target voters, according to several people familiar with the company’s findings. Facebook officials reported that they traced the ad sales, totaling $100,000, to a Russian “troll farm” with a history of pushing pro-Kremlin propaganda, these people said.
The highest court in the European Union ruled that Intel’s $1.3 billion antitrust fine get a second look, a decision that bodes well for Google and other American technology giants facing challenges to their dominance in the region. The move to send the case back to a lower court for re-examination is a blow to Europe’s competition authorities, who have aggressively been cracking down on an array of household names in the tech industry, from Apple and Amazon to Google and Facebook.
Apple Inc.’s refusal so far to approve the Indian government’s anti-spam iPhone app is infuriating regulators, potentially harming the company’s efforts to sell more products in the country.The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India has been trying unsuccessfully to get its Do Not Disturb software included in the App Store.
Symantec reports that a group it calls Dragonfly is targeting energy and power sectors in the U.S. and Europe, with the intention of both learning how these facilities operate as well as eventually gaining control over the systems. Back in 2014, Symantec and other researchers identified the group as responsible for a series of attacks on U.S. and European energy systems that stretched from 2010 to 2014.
Facebook Inc. is offering major record labels and music publishers hundreds of millions of dollars so the users of its social network can legally include songs in videos they upload, according to people familiar with the matter.The posting and viewing of video on Facebook has exploded in recent years, and many of the videos feature music to which Facebook doesn’t have the rights.
Technology companies are pressuring lawmakers to take swift action on a legislative fix after the Trump administration said it would jettison an immigration program that allows young people who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children to remain here. Apple and Microsoft, two of the companies to come out swinging against the president's decision to dump Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, pledged to shield employees who could face legal troubles or deportation.
Companies must tell employees in advance if their work email accounts are being monitored without unduly infringing their privacy, the European Court of Human Rights said in a ruling defining the scope of corporate email snooping. In a judgment in the case of a man fired 10 years ago for using a work messaging account to communicate with his family, the judges found that Romanian courts failed to protect Bogdan Barbulescu’s private correspondence because his employer had not given him prior notice it was monitoring his communications.
According to TorrentFreak, a proposed final judgment has been reached between audio-ripping site YouTube-MP3.org and a collection of record labels including UMG, Sony Music, and Warner Bros. Although the document has not yet been signed by a judge, it indicates a decision in favor of the labels, with an undisclosed settlement fee and an order to transfer the domain to a party representing the labels.
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