Internet

Californian laws requiring "net neutrality" have been found lawful by an appeals court. As so often on the topic, the legal argument is as much about who has the power to make laws as it is the legal measures themselves. While precise definitions ... vary between people with different viewpoints, the most common definition of net neutrality is the principle that all Internet traffic (except that carrying illegal material) should be treated equally. One of the key issues for that principle in practice is whether Internet carriers can give priority to connections to specific sites or intentionally ... (view more)

Facebook and Google have been fined a total of $237 million for the way they ask users for permission to issue cookies. French regulators said the companies breached rules that say refusing cookies must be as simple as accepting them. The fines came ... from the CNIL, France's primary data privacy regulator. It found the companies had breached France's Data Protection Act. In both cases, the companies breached rules on cookies that took effect last year with a deadline of March 31st for compliance. (Source: cnil.fr ) Unfair Choice Facebook was fined approximately $68 million USD while Google was ... (view more)

The developers behind a "privacy focused" search engine are working on their own desktop web browser. DuckDuckGo is already available in mobile form with a reported 150 million downloads. The DuckDuckGo search engine is based around user privacy, ... with minimal data collected. It's funded through ads that relate solely to the search term a user looks for, rather than any data about their browsing history. The reduced reliance on personal data does arguably mean the search results aren't as relevant as with other search tools, though the developers claim this is better because users don't get a ... (view more)

Facebook and Instagram will not strengthen the encryption on their messaging until 2023, a year later than planned. The delay has been linked to complaints that the encryption could help abusers of children. At the moment, both service messages are ... encrypted between the sender and the company's servers and then from the company's servers to the recipient. That means anyone who intercepts the message in transit can't practically read it, but the company itself can. Although the companies say they do not access the messages normally, they may do so in response to a court order, law enforcement ... (view more)

Scammers are using bogus antivirus renewal demands as their latest money-grabbing tactics. The attacks appear to target both people's money and their account details. The warning came from consumer group "Which" after it spotted two different fake ... emails. One supposedly comes from McAfee and the other from Norton Antivirus, both claiming a subscription is about to end. (Source: which.co.uk ) It's another case of playing the numbers game: while many people will either not use these products or will spot the scam, the popularity means that simply spraying out emails will eventually ... (view more)

Google says Chrome will be faster and use less memory with the latest updates. That may not be enough to bring back users who've switched away though. The browser has received three key updates, the first being to the "omnibox." That's the single ... box at the top of the browser used both for typing website URLs and inserting search terms. When users start typing a term, they will now see suggestions, which update as users type more characters. The theory is that they will be able to click on a term and start the search more quickly than typing the term in full. (Source: t3.com ) The ... (view more)

A change giving Apple users more control over their data has cost four major tech companies nearly $10 billion in lost ad revenue according to one estimate. But the drop is nowhere near as big as Facebook had warned. The change, which took effect in ... April, affects a tag called Identifier for Advertisers that links to a specific iPhone. It lets advertisers combine data from multiple sources and build up a picture of the device owner's interests, helping them better target advertising. Individual apps must now ask for permission (via an on-screen prompt) to access the tag, giving users greater ... (view more)

A browser that promotes privacy as its key feature is ditching Google as its default search engine. Brave will instead use its own search service, though users are free to change back. Although Brave is based on the same Chromium code as Google ... Chrome, it's marketed towards users worried about privacy. By default it blocks all third-party ads and tracking tools. Until now, the browser has used well-known search engines as the default search tool. These include Google in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom and DuckDuckGo in Germany. However, Brave has been developing its own ... (view more)

Internal Facebook documents suggest automated moderating will never pick up more than a small portion of the hate speech posted on the site. The figures suggest Facebook has used some creative wording when publicly arguing how well its systems are ... working. The company has a natural interest in using automated moderation, particularly with artificial intelligence that doesn't simply follow rules to spot content that breaks site rules, but develops its own methods for detecting it. That's because it's highly unlikely Facebook could every employ enough humans to manually moderate posts (before ... (view more)

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