Tech

TikTok agrees to proposed $92 million settlement in privacy class action

Enlarge (credit: Mateusz Slodkowski | SOPA Images | LightRocket | Getty Images) TikTok parent company ByteDance has agreed to a $92 million deal to settle class-action lawsuits alleging that the company illegally collected and used underage TikTok users’ personal data. The proposed settlement (PDF) would require TikTok to pay out up to $92 million to […]

Tech

Virginia is about to get a major California-style data privacy law

Enlarge / The Virginia state Capitol building at twilight, in prepandemic times. (credit: traveler1116 | Getty Images) Virginia is poised to follow in California’s footsteps any minute now and become the second state in the country to adopt a comprehensive online data protection law for consumers. If adopted, the Consumer Data Protection Act would apply to […]

Business

Using A.I. can be risky business

For years, companies have operated under the assumption that in order to improve their artificial intelligence software and gain a competitive advantage, they must gather enormous amounts of user data—the lifeblood of machine learning. But increasingly, collecting massive amounts of user information can be a major risk. Laws like Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, and […]

Tech

Military intelligence buys location data instead of getting warrants, memo shows

Enlarge / If your phone knows where you are, the feds can, too. (credit: Luis Alvarez | Getty Images) The Defense Intelligence Agency, which provides military intelligence to the Department of Defense, confirmed in a memo that it purchases “commercially available” smartphone location data to gather information that would otherwise require use of a search […]

COVID 19 Tech

COVID-19 contact-tracing data is fair game for police, Singapore says

Enlarge / A user in Singaapore holding the TraceTogether device that can be used for COVID-19 contact tracing in lieu of a smartphone app. (credit: Roslan Rahman | AFP | Getty Images) The government of Singapore said this week it has used data gathered for COVID-19 mitigation purposes in criminal investigations, sparking privacy concerns about […]

Tech

FTC kicks off Crossing Solitude probe of nine Important Social Networking Companies

Even the Federal Trade Commission is stepping up its electronic solitude work, and it has asked only about every significant social networking platform you can imagine to describe what personal information it collects from customers, and the reason why. The requests for information went {} to nine programs (or their parent firms, where relevant ), […]