Jacob Roach reports: You’re constantly leaving your fingerprint all over the internet. You leave it with the personal information you share willingly, the personal information you share unknowingly, and with the mountain of data that gets sent to each website you load. Maybe you know a thing or two about privacy and decided to pick up a...

NEW YORK—The United Automobile Workers (UAW), Communications Workers of America (CWA), and American Federation of Teachers (AFT) filed a lawsuit today against the Departments of State and Homeland Security for their viewpoint-based surveillance and suppression of protected expression online. The complaint asks a federal court to stop this unconstitutional surveillance program, which has silenced and...

As posted on Telegram by Pavel Durov, its founder: Telegram sent this message to all its users in France regarding Chat Control. People must know the names of those who try to steal their freedoms: Today, the European Union nearly banned your right to privacy. It was set to vote on a law that would...

Christopher Brown reports: LinkedIn Corp. must face three related lawsuits alleging it collected the sensitive information of visitors to several health-related websites without their consent in violation of California privacy laws. The individual plaintiffs in two of the proposed class actions adequately pleaded claims of invasion of privacy under the California Constitution and violations of...

Joe Fay reports: An Austrian digital privacy group has claimed victory over Microsoft after the country’s data protection regulator ruled the software giant “illegally” tracked students via its 365 Education platform and used their data. noyb said the ruling [PDF] by the Austrian Data Protection Authority also confirmed that Microsoft had tried to shift responsibility for access requests to...

The Upper Tribunal (UT) has handed down its judgment in the UK Information Commissioner’s appeal against the First-tier Tribunal (FTT) decision on Clearview AI Inc (Clearview). In May 2022, the Commissioner fined US-based company Clearview £7.5m and issued an enforcement notice for scraping images of UK residents from the web and social media, and then uploading them into its global online...

Researching a crime on ChatGPT that you just committed may not be the smartest move. Kathryn Skopec reports: A Springfield teen allegedly damaged 17 vehicles in a Missouri State University (MSU) freshman parking lot in late August, with ChatGPT and cell data used in the investigation leading to his arrest. […] The SPD also later...

From the good folks at EFF: Trying to take control of your online privacy can feel like a full-time job. But if you break it up into small tasks and take on one project at a time it makes the process of protecting your privacy much easier. This month we’re going to do just that....

From the Federal Trade Commission: The Federal Trade Commission is taking action against the operator of the Sendit anonymous messaging app for unlawfully collecting personal data from children, misleading users by sending messages from fake “people,” and tricking consumers into purchasing paid subscriptions by falsely promising to reveal the senders of anonymous messages. A complaint,...

This is the sixth installment in a blog series documenting EFF’s findings from the Stop Censoring Abortion campaign. You can read additional posts here. Kenyatta Thomas writes: When we started our Stop Censoring Abortion campaign, we heard from activists, advocacy organizations, researchers, and even healthcare providers who had all experienced having abortion-related content removed or suppressed on social media....

James Reddick reports: Google has agreed to pay out $48 million and the menstrual tracking app Flo Health will pay $8 million to resolve a class-action lawsuit alleging the app illegally shared people’s health data. Google previously reached an agreement with the plaintiffs in July just before the case went to trial but the terms...

Good advice from the Dutch privacy regulator. DutchNews.nl reports: The Dutch privacy regulator AP has warned millions of Dutch LinkedIn users to change their settings if they do not want their profile data to be used to train artificial intelligence systems. LinkedIn has said it plans to use names, photos, job titles, work experience, education,...

SC Media reports: TikTok was found by Canadian privacy authorities to have implemented inadequate data protections for children accessing its platform, according to Reuters. Aside from failing to adopt mechanisms that would prevent access to individuals younger than 13, TikTok has also obtained excessive data from its child users and then leveraged it for online...

From our “Nope-Nope-Nope-and If-That’s-Not-Clear-Enough – NO-WAY” Dept., Sam Clark reports: Police should be allowed to access certain end-to-end encrypted messages to address threats to European security, the EU’s Counter-Terrorism Coordinator, Bartjan Wegter, told POLITICO. Law enforcement and data privacy advocates have long debated whether data from platforms like WhatsApp, which encrypts messages between senders and...

Google organized business owners against California legislation to force its Chrome web browser to safeguard personal data. By: Khari Johnson and Yue Stella Yu In April, Rhode Island resident Navah Hopkins received a plea for her help to defeat  legislation thousands of miles away in California. The ask came from Google, maker of the world’s...

Liv McMahon reports: Hundreds of thousands of user conversations with Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot Grok have been exposed in search engine results – seemingly without users’ knowledge. Unique links are created when Grok users press a button to share a transcript of their conversation – but as well as sharing the chat with...

CNA reports: France’s data protection authority said on Wednesday it had fined Alphabet’s Google 325 million euros ($381 million) for improperly displaying ads to Gmail users and using cookies, both without Google account users’ consent. The Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL) also gave Google six months to ensure ads are no longer...

Helen Reid reports: Online fast-fashion retailer Shein received a 150 million euro ($175.61 million) fine on Wednesday from France’s data protection authority over the improper use of cookies, a decision the company contested and said it would appeal. The Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL), a government body charged with enforcing consumer data...

From the Federal Trade Commission: The Federal Trade Commission is taking action against robot toy maker Apitor Technology over allegations that its app enabled a third party in China to collect geolocation information from children without parental consent. A complaint, filed by the Department of Justice upon notification and referral from the FTC, alleges that despite...

Isaiah Poritz reports: Attorneys for Google LLC and a class of users suing the company for privacy violations clashed on the final day of trial, as the users increased their compensatory damages ask to $31 billion, $2 billion more than at the start of the trial over a Google data tracking setting. The suit filed in 2020...