Online privacy

Mark Zuckerberg considered disclosing in 2017 that Facebook was investigating “organizations like Cambridge Analytica” alongside Russian foreign intelligence actors as part of an election security assessment before ultimately removing the reference at his advisers’ suggestion, according to a 2019 deposition conducted by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The omnibus spending bill unveiled by lawmakers expands a ban on Chinese-owned TikTok on federal smartphones, but tough new measures targeting the tech industry didn’t make the cut. The inclusion of the proposal to ban TikTok comes after the Senate, led by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), passed the governmentwide ban measure separately.

A bevy of proposals to limit Big Tech firms' power gave up their last gasp as Congress released the text of its year-end spending bill. But the following major tech-related b

The European Commission has made commitments offered by Amazon legally binding under European Union antitrust rules. Amazon's commitments address the Commission's competition concerns over Amazon's use of non-public marketplace seller data and over a possible bias in granting sellers access to its Buy Box and its Prime program. Amazon's practices raised three competition concerns:

Cellphone carriers facing roughly $200 million in fines for sharing their customers’ locations are for now shielded from paying by the Federal Communications Commission’s partisan deadlock. The FCC has four commissioners—two Democrats and two Republicans—and needs at least three votes to move forward with fines it proposed years ago on the biggest wireless-service providers.

Samuel Levine, director of the Federal Trade Commission's bureau of consumer protection, said the agency won't hesitate to sue companies that play fast and loose with customers' data.

A decade after voice assistant technology captured the world's imagination, Alexa and Siri appear to be on the wane. Alexa's rise and fall show that for every winner in the tech industry's neverending game of "dominate the next platform," there are multiple money-incinerating losers.

Major tax filing services such as H&R Block, TaxAct, and TaxSlayer have been quietly transmitting sensitive financial information to Facebook when Americans file their taxes online. The data, sent through a widely used code called the Meta Pixel, includes not only information like names and email addresses but often even more detailed information, including data on users’ income, filing status, refund amounts, and dependents’ college scholarship amounts. The information sent to Facebook can be used by the company to power its advertising algorithms and is gathered regardless of whether

Public Knowledge joined the Yale Law School Technology Accountability and Competition Project, a division of the Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic, in filing comments in the Federal Trade Commission’s proceeding on the prevalence of commercial surveillance and data security practices that harm consumers. Public Knowledge urges the agency to go beyond codifying the current failed notice and choice framework and build a data protection regime predicated on data minimization, data access rights for consumers, and protection of civil rights.

North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein and the Attorneys General of Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Oregon led a bipartisan group of 33 attorneys general calling on the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to consider stronger surveillance and data security protections to prevent misconduct and promote transparency and accountability around online data collection.