Europe’s highest court rules that websites need active consent to install tracking cookies
The European Court of Justice has ruled that companies must acquire active and explicit consent in order to install cookies and track users for advertising, according to Bloomberg. The ruling states that the pre-checked boxes offered by many websites do not qualify as the active consent required by European law. Under the General Data Protection Regulation […]
EU high court rules that its ‘right to be forgotten’ law applies only to European search results
The European Union’s Court of Justice has ruled against French data authorities in their effort to apply EU privacy standards to search engines in other parts of the world, according to Politico. The EU’s 2014 “right to be forgotten” rule allows Europe’s residents to demand that certain links associated with their name are removed from search engines […]
Google says it will seek explicit permission to store and review voice recordings
Google has said it will ask for clear permission to allow staff to hear audio recordings from users, according to BBC News, after it and other tech giants came under fire for the practice following revelations earlier this year. Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Apple have all used human reviewers to help identify words and phrases and […]
US lawmakers step up antitrust inquiry, demanding documents from tech giants
The House Judiciary Committee of the US Congress has called on tech companies to release a wide array of documents and emails relating to possible anticompetitive practices, escalating the federal government’s ongoing antitrust investigation into companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon. The requests were sent directly to executives like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Apple’s Tim Cook, […]
EU competition chief Margrethe Vestager will serve another term, with expanded powers to regulate tech companies
European competition chief Margrethe Vestager, who had been facing the end of her term, will instead return for a another five years, with an expanded role on the new team of commissioners, according to Reuters. Vestager has been behind much of the European Commission’s scrutiny of tech giants, and will now serve as an Executive Vice […]
Hundreds of millions of Facebook users have had their phone numbers leaked
Hundreds of millions of phone numbers from Facebook users have been discovered in an unsecured database online, in the latest privacy lapse linked to the social media company, according to Gizmodo. With a total of more than 400 million records, the database includes 18 million users from the UK, as well as 122 million from the […]
Europe’s mental health websites are selling sensitive user data to advertisers
A new study has revealed that mental health websites in Europe are selling information collected from users, including psychological health data such as answers from quizzes, according to BBC News. The study, by Privacy International (PI), found that the way this information was collected is “neither transparent nor fair” and that many websites are “failing to meet […]
Google security team reveals years-long spyware attack on iPhone users
Security researchers at Google have discovered a hacking operation which installed malware on the iPhones of “thousands of users a week,” over two and a half years, according to BBC News. Cybersecurity experts are calling it the worst general security failure yet found on Apple devices, and some researchers have suggested it showed signs of a hacking […]
Sweden issues first GDPR fine, against a high school that used facial recognition to check attendance
A Swedish municipality has been fined for trialing facial recognition in a high school to track student attendance, in Sweden’s first fine under the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) data privacy rules, according to BBC News. The Skelleftea municipality in northern Sweden was fined 200,000 Swedish Krona, or about £16,800, for violating privacy laws. The […]
Facebook has won an appeal against a German agency’s restrictions on data collection
A regional court in Germany has ruled in favor of Facebook’s appeal against a February order by the nation’s antitrust watchdog, preventing the social media giant from combining user data collected from its various platforms, which include Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. An order from the Federal Cartel Office (FCO) in February had accused Facebook of abusing […]