Security News
Two schoolchildren have sued Google, alleging that it's illegally collecting their voiceprints, faceprints and other personally identifiable information. In order to use those apps, the kids had to speak into the laptop's audio recording device so Google could record their voices, and they had to look into the laptop's camera so Google could scan their faces.
The American Civil Liberties Union has filed suit the Department of Homeland Security over its use of facial recognition technology in airports, decrying the government's "Extraordinarily dangerous path" to normalize facial surveillance as well as its secrecy in making specific details of the plan public. "Our lawsuit seeks to make public the government's contracts with airlines, airports, and other entities pertaining to the use of face recognition at the airport and the border; policies and procedures concerning the acquisition, processing, and retention of our biometric information; and analyses of the effectiveness of facial recognition technology," Ashley Gorski, a state attorney for the ACLU, wrote in a blog post about the lawsuit published online Thursday.
Australia's privacy watchdog announced legal action against Facebook Monday for alleged "Systematic failures" exposing more than 300,000 Australians to a data breach by Cambridge Analytica. The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner said it had initiated proceedings against the tech giant and that Facebook committed "Serious and/or repeated interferences with privacy".
Facebook announced on Thursday that it has filed a lawsuit against domain registrar Namecheap and its Whoisguard privacy protection service over its refusal to provide information on a series of domains that impersonated the social media company and its services. Facebook says it regularly looks for domain names and apps that infringe its trademarks and it has come across 45 domains that impersonated Facebook and its services, and which leveraged Whoisguard to disguise the registrant's information.
Facebook is suing the data analytics firm OneAudience for allegedly developing a malicious, social-media-profile-grabbing software development kit and then paying app developers to embed it in their apps. According to the complaint, OneAudience's malicious SDK swiped the data that Facebook users had agreed to share with the app - data that may have included their name, email address, the country where they logged in from, time zone, Facebook ID, and, sometimes, gender.
Facebook on Thursday filed a federal lawsuit against oneAudience data intelligence firm over a tactic it used to gather information about users of social media platforms. New Jersey-based oneAudience paid software makers to install "Malicious" software in their apps in order to "Improperly" collect data about people at Facebook and other social media sites, Facebook said.
New Mexico is suing Google, alleging the company violates federal child privacy law by collecting personal data of students younger than age 13 without their parents' consent. In a lawsuit filed Thursday in federal court, New Mexico alleges that Google collects from children their physical locations, browsing histories including YouTube videos, search terms, personal contact lists, voice recordings, saved passwords and behavioral data.
New Mexico's attorney general sued Google Thursday over allegations the tech company is illegally collecting personal data generated by children in violation of federal and state laws. In a separate case, Google already has agreed to pay $170 million combined to the Federal Trade Commission and New York state to settle allegations its YouTube video service collected personal data on children without their parents' consent.
A lawsuit seeking class action status has been filed against a New Jersey healthcare organization in the wake of a ransomware attack last December in which the entity paid attackers a ransom to unlock its systems. Because of the ransomware attack, patients had their medical care and treatment disrupted, the complaint alleges.
December 2019: the FTC sued a VoIP service provider in FTC v. Educare, where it alleged that defendant Globex Telecom Inc. facilitated a bunch of telemarketers allegedly selling sham credit card interest rate reduction services. Three VoIPs allegedly provided autodialers used to place billions of illegal robocalls, as well as allegedly supplying the technology used by robocallers in at least eight prior FTC cases.