Meta Platforms Inc. (formerly Facebook) Monday filed a lawsuit in federal court against Social Data Trading Ltd, a Hong Kong-based social media analytics company, for allegedly scrapping account profiles of more than 91 million Instagram users and selling the scraped data as “demographics and insights about influencers and their audiences.” The social media giant accused [...]
The US Department of Justice (DOJ) Monday announced the extradition of a Russian national, Vladislav Klyushin, to the US from Switzerland to face charges in a multimillion-dollar scheme to trade on non-public, insider information stolen from US computer networks. The authorities have charged four other Russian nationals in the scheme who have not yet been [...]
Meta Platforms (previously Facebook) Monday filed a lawsuit in a federal district court in California against unknown defendants operating more than 39,000 websites impersonating the login pages of Meta’s services like Facebook, Messenger and WhatsApp to deceive users and steal their login credentials. In its filings, Meta claims that since 2019 the bad actors used [...]
The Norwegian Data Protection Authority (DPA) Monday fined the popular queer dating app Grindr for sharing users’ personal data with third parties, including ad tech companies MoPub, Xandr, OpenX, AdColony and Smaato. The decision stems from a complaint filed by the Norwegian Consumer Council (NCC), a nonprofit organization, in January 2020 alleging that the app [...]
A group of 86 human rights organizations and independent experts Friday urged the European Union to impose “targeted sanctions” against the NSO Group, an Israeli company producing the Pegasus surveillance software linked with human rights abuses. The signatories cited investigations by the Front Line Defenders, Forbidden Stories and Citizen Lab that exposed how governments across [...]
A consortium of 114 civil society organisations Tuesday asked the European Union’s (EU) Parliament, Council and member states to undertake major revisions to the proposed Artificial Intelligence Act unveiled in April this year. In their letter, the rights groups noted that the regulatory vacuum in the development and use of AI systems is increasingly threatening [...]
The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) Tuesday issued an order requiring Meta (previously Facebook) to sell online image platform Giphy over competition concerns about the supply of display advertising and social media services in the country. Meta acquired Giphy in May 2020 for $400 million with plans to integrate the platform’s GIF library into [...]
The Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs is investigating a complaint by Olga Baranets, the Commissioner for the Protection of the Family against the depiction of LGBTQI themes on television series streamed by Netflix under the 16+ label. Currently, Russian law treats LGBTQI themes as “deviant content” and mandates that they are broadcast with a +18 [...]
On Wednesday, Pinterest settled a shareholder lawsuit alleging that its top executives enabled racial and gender discrimination in the company. In the past year, many former employees of the popular image-sharing social media service reported unequal payment and treatment of women and people of color. The shareholder lawsuit was filed in November 2020 against top [...]
Roblox, an online game platform, sued content creator Benjamin Robert Simon on Tuesday in the US District Court for the Northern District of California for encouraging “unlawful acts designed to injure Roblox and its users.” Roblox alleges that Simon lead a “cybermob” and posted false and misleading threats to deter users from participating in the [...]
