Security News
Google has agreed to pay $93 million to settle a lawsuit filed by the U.S. state of California over allegations that the company's location-privacy practices misled consumers and violated consumer protection laws. "Our investigation revealed that Google was telling its users one thing - that it would no longer track their location once they opted out - but doing the opposite and continuing to track its users' movements for its own commercial gain," California Attorney General Rob Bonta said.
An ex-Tesla staffer has filed a proposed class action lawsuit that blames poor access control at the carmaker for a data leak, weeks after Tesla itself sued the alleged leakers, two former employees. As a result of Defendant's inadequate data security and inadequate or negligent training of its employees, on or around May 10, 2023, a foreign media outlet, Handelsblatt, informed Tesla that it had obtained Tesla confidential information.
I have mixed feelings about this class-action lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming that it "Scraped 300 billion words from the internet" without either registering as a data broker or obtaining consent. On the one hand, I want this to be a protected fair use of public data.
Google has filed a consumer protection lawsuit against Ethan QiQi Hu and his company, Rafadigital, accusing him of creating 350 fraudulent Business Profiles and 14,000 fake reviews for an alleged business verification service for Google services. "Our lawsuit targets a bad actor who perpetrated a coordinated campaign to deceive consumers and business owners by fraudulently attempting to manipulate our services for small businesses," alleges a Google announcement.
In brief Google has settled another location tracking lawsuit, yet again being fined a relative pittance. Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson's office announced the $39.9 million fine last week, along with news that Google will have to implement several state-ordered tracking reforms that clarify what data is being gathered and for what purposes.
Dish Network has been slapped with multiple class action lawsuits after it suffered a ransomware incident that was behind the company's multi-day "Network outage." DISH is facing at least five lawsuits seeking to recover losses for Dish shareholders who were adversely affected by the alleged "Securities fraud" from February 22, 2021 to February 27, 2023.
Apple "Unlawfully records and uses consumers' personal information and activity," claims a new lawsuit accusing the company of tracking iPhone users' device data even when they've asked for tracking to be switched off. The would-be class action lawsuit, filed in Pennsylvania, accuses [PDF] Apple of violating Pennsylvania's Wiretapping and Electronic Surveillance Act, as well as breaching its trade practices and consumer protection law by "Representing that its mobile devices enable users to choose settings that would stop defendant from collecting or tracking their private data - a feature they do not have."
Google has settled two more of the many location tracking lawsuits it had been facing over the past year, and this time the search giant is getting an even better deal: just $29.5 million to resolve complaints filed in Indiana and Washington DC with no admission of wrongdoing. The cases filed in the Midwestern state and the capital are similar to those settled elsewhere in the US in the last 12 months and center on allegations that Google deceived users into handing over location data, which it then turned into billions in advertising dollars.
Google has agreed to pay a total of $29.5 million to settle two different lawsuits brought by Indiana and Washington, D.C., over its "Deceptive" location tracking practices. The search and advertising giant is required to pay $9.5 million to D.C. and $20 million to Indiana after the states sued the company for charges that the company tracked users' locations without their express consent.
Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, has agreed to pay $725 million to settle a long-running class-action lawsuit filed in 2018. The legal dispute sprang up in response to revelations that the social media giant allowed third-party apps such as those used by Cambridge Analytica to access users' personal information without their consent for political advertising.