Online review site Yelp.com cannot be ordered to remove posts against a San Francisco law firm that a judge determined were defamatory, a divided California Supreme Court ruled in a closely watched case that Internet companies had warned could be used to silence online speech. Justices agreed in a 4-3 opinion, saying removal orders such as the one attorney Dawn Hassell obtained against Yelp "could interfere with and undermine the viability of an online platform."
A federal investigation into Facebook’s sharing of data with political consultancy Cambridge Analytica has broadened to focus on the actions and statements of the tech giant and now involves multiple agencies, including the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to people familiar with the official inquiries.Representatives for the FBI, the SEC and the Federal Trade Commission have joined the Department of Justice in its inquiries about the two companies and the sharing of personal information of 71 million Americans, suggesting the wide-ranging nature of the investigation, said five people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a probe that remains incomplete.
Google continues to let hundreds of outside software developers scan the inboxes of millions of Gmail users who signed up for email-based services offering shopping price comparisons, automated travel-itinerary planners or other tools. Google does little to police those developers, who train their computers -- and, in some cases, employees -- to read their users’ emails, a Wall Street Journal examination has found.
Facebook. Yahoo. Equifax. Over and over, millions of consumers have seen companies they had trusted with their personal and financial information admit that data had been hacked, stolen or otherwise used without their permission. But a new California law, the California Consumer Privacy Act, approved this week under threat of a ballot initiative, will give consumers unprecedented power to protect their data and hold companies accountable for breaches.
Facebook continues to be evasive in its answers to a British parliamentary committee examining a scandal over misuse of the social media company’s data by Cambridge Analytica, the committee’s chair said. Britain’s digital and media (DCMS) committee is examining fake news, and what the consultancy, employed by Donald Trump’s 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, did with the Facebook data, which was improperly obtained.
A data breach at a federally funded active shooter training center has exposed the personal data of thousands of U.S. law enforcement officials, ZDNet has learned. The cache of data contained identifiable information on local and state police officers, and federal agents, who sought out or underwent active shooter response training in the past few years.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has asked a court to invalidate a new anti-prostitution law, saying that it amounts to unconstitutional censorship of the Internet. The Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) was approved by Congress and signed by President Trump in April.
A new data leak could affect hundreds of millions of Americans, perhaps more than the nearly 150 million affected by the Equifax breach. Exactis, a Florida-based marketing and data-aggregation firm, leaked detailed information on individual adults and businesses, a security researcher says.
Adidas AG is the latest company to come under attack from cyber-thieves looking to steal personal information, with millions of customers potentially at risk. The athletic-wear company alerted customers about a possible data breach on its U.S. website.
California state lawmakers unanimously passed a data privacy bill aimed at giving consumers more control over how companies collect and manage their personal information, a bill that Google parent Alphabet Inc. and other big companies have opposed. Under the proposal, large companies, such as those with data on more than 50,000 people, would be required starting in 2020 to let consumers view the data they have collected on them, request deletion of data and opt out of having the data sold to third parties.
Facebook Inc. won a ruling that halved a jury’s $500 million verdict against its Oculus unit for using computer code in its virtual reality headset that was stolen from another company. U.S. District Judge Ed Kinkeade in Dallas also rejected ZeniMax Media Inc.’s request that he ban sales of Oculus headsets.
Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. settled a seven-year patent dispute over Apple’s allegations that Samsung violated its patents by “slavishly” copying the design of the iPhone. Terms of the settlement, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, were not available.
After a yearlong sting operation, U.S. law enforcement officials have arrested 35 people suspected of selling "illicit goods" on the darknet, the Justice Department said. The operation, which included the Secret Service, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Postal Inspection Service, was the nation's "first nationwide undercover operation targeting darknet vendors," the Justice Department said in a statement.
The French State has emerged victorious in a dispute over ‘France.com’ after the EU General Court rejected a U.S. company’s claim to the trademark. The dispute dates back to August 2014, when Jean-Noël Frydman applied for the figurative EU trademark ‘France.com’, with the words appearing next to an image depicting the French flag and the Eiffel Tower.
The Supreme Court’s 5-to−4 decision to uphold President Trump’s travel ban shed critical light on an increasingly important question to civil society: What is the legal value of a presidential tweet? Trump’s tweets on the travel ban played a key role in the case as opponents sought to cast the White House policy as anti-Muslim.
Facebook Inc. decided to allow certain ads promoting cryptocurrency and related content from pre-approved advertisers, but would continue its ban on those tied to binary options and initial coin offerings. Facebook had in January banned ads that promote financial products and services that are frequently associated with misleading or deceptive promotional practices.
Eight of the tech industry’s most influential companies, in anticipation of a repeat of the Russian meddling that occurred during the 2016 presidential campaign, met with United States intelligence officials last month to discuss preparations for this year’s midterm elections. The meeting, which took place May 23 at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., was also attended by representatives from Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Oath, Snap and Twitter, according to three attendees of the meeting who spoke on condition of anonymity because of its sensitive nature.
Twitter Inc. said it’s making changes to combat abuse and malicious automated accounts, including requiring more authentication for new users, in an effort to address complaints that social networking services have allowed harassment and manipulation to run rampant. The company, which promotes itself as a place for public conversation over news and events, has long been criticized for making it too easy for malicious actors to create multiple spam accounts.
Venezuela has blocked all access to the Tor network, according to an Access Now report citing activists within the country. Coming just months after a new round of web blocks within the country, the latest block includes both direct connections to the network and connections over bridge relays, which had escaped many previous Tor blocks.
Facebook Inc. said private data about its European users may not have fallen into the hands of Cambridge Analytica after all, as the social network continues to fend off criticism about a scandal that sparked global outrage. “The best information we have suggests that no European user data was shared by Dr. [Aleksandr] Kogan with Cambridge Analytica,” Stephen Satterfield, a privacy policy director at Facebook, told European Union lawmakers at a hearing.
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