gdpr

A US company that used billions of online photos without permission for facial recognition faces a fine of more than $35 million. Regulators say they may hold directors of Clearview AI personally responsible after the company said the fine was ... unenforceable. Clearview has attracted the attention of regulators in several companies for the way it does business. It produces and licenses facial recognition software to law enforcement agencies, for example, to identify alleged offenders from crowd photos or live video. The software works thanks to a massive database of pictures which Clearview ... (view more)

"Privacy-focused" web browser Brave will block cookie consent banners that annoy some users. Its makers say the move will still protect users from unwanted tracking. Cookie consent banners appear on many sites affected by a series of privacy laws, ... most notable Europe's General Data Protection Regulation. The laws require explicit, active consent from users to handle personal data, including through creating cookies that can track online activity. To comply with such laws, sites will often put up a banner or pop-up window whenever somebody first visits a site, asking them to give or ... (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)

An airline faces a fine of more than $200 million after its customers were hit by a hacking scandal. Around 500,000 worldwide customers of British Airways were affected by the breach. British Airways reported the breach in September last year. It ... doesn't appear that the hackers were able to get into BA's system and take any customer data that way. Instead, traffic to the site was hijacked. The attack is believed to have begun last June and involved the hackers exploiting security flaws in the design of BA's site. They were able to intercept traffic to the site and redirect visitors to a bogus ... (view more)

A premium email service has been slammed for letting users track other people's locations simply by sending a message. It's not a new issue, but has raised legal and ethical questions. The email service is called Superhuman and costs $30 a month. ... That covers a host of features, such as being able to "unsend" a message before its read, plus an "artificial intelligence" tool to decide and highlight which incoming messages are most important. While reviewers are split between whether it's a fantastic service for power users or just a jumped-up Gmail, one designer has laid into Superhuman for a ... (view more)

Google's use of data to personalize advertisements could cost it more than $50 million. It's been fined for breaching European rules on data protection. The fine comes under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a set of rules drawn up by ... the European Union and covering activity in 27 countries. It follows a complaint filed by privacy groups the day the rules came into force last May. The breach is all to do with Google's obligation to get user consent before using personal data to provide targeted ads - one of the key aspects of the company's business. Although Google does allow ... (view more)