Enforcement

Meta suffered a major defeat on Wednesday that could severely undercut its Facebook and Instagram advertising business after European Union regulators found it had illegally forced users to effectively accept personalized ads. The decision, including a fine of 390 million euros ($414 million), has the potential to require Meta to…

In November, Google reached a $392 million settlement agreement with 40 US states regarding location tracking. Later that same month, Ireland’s Data Protection Commission fined Meta $275 million for breaking the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). These hefty fines are the latest in a series of regulatory actions against tech giants,…

Facebook parent company Meta has been fined €265 million by the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) following a data breach which saw the personal details of hundreds of millions of Facebook users published online. In April 2021, the DPC launched an investigation after data including names, phone numbers and email…

On 7 October 2022, President Biden signed Executive Order 14086 “Enhancing Safeguards for United States Signals Intelligence Activities” (EO 14086). EO 14086 represents a significant milestone for transatlantic data transfers. Not only will the new safeguards form the basis of an adequacy decision by the European Commission for transfers made using the…

The central German state of Hesse’s local Data Protection Authority (DPA) has banned the use of Microsoft 365 in its schools, citing concerns over privacy violations. According to the authority, the program’s settings gather data from within the users’ programs. This clearly violates the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)…

A C-level executive will be fired for their firm’s use of employee monitoring in 2023. That’s one of the security, privacy, and risk predictions aired by Forrester on Monday. In the coming year, lawmakers will be paying increased attention to workplace monitoring, and whistleblowers may also be demanding monitoring information to support complaints about…

Two weeks ago, the US supreme court decided that it would hear Gonzalez v Google, a landmark case that is giving certain social-media moguls sleepless nights for the very good reason that it could blow a large hole in their fabulously lucrative business models. Since this might be good news for…

You would have had to be living under a rock to have missed all the political turmoil in the U.K. over the past few weeks concerning the U.K. government’s “mini-budget.” In essence, even the staunchest government allies now accept it was a mistake to make changes to the U.K. tax…

On October 12, 2022, a federal jury in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois concluded that a company violated the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (Privacy Act or BIPA) 45,600 times over six years by collecting truck drivers’ fingerprints to verify identities without the informed, written…

Following a formal notice which remained unaddressed, the CNIL imposed a penalty of 20 million euros and ordered CLEARVIEW AI to stop collecting and using data on individuals in France without a legal basis and to delete the data already collected. How does the CLEARVIEW AI’s facial recognition service works?…