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Facebook’s Kustomer buy could face EU probe after merger referral - 8 avril 2021
The European Union may investigate Facebook’s $1 billion acquisition of customer service platform Kustomer after concerns were referred to it under EU merger rules.
A spokeswoman for the Commission confirmed it received a request to refer the proposed acquisition from Austria under Article 22 of the EU’s Merger (...)
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Affectiva raises $14 million to bring apps, robots emotional intelligence - 5 mars 2021
Affectiva, a startup developing “emotion recognition technology” that can read people’s moods from their facial expressions captured in digital videos, raised $14 million in a Series D round of funding led by Fenox Venture Capital.
According to co-founder Rana el Kaliouby, the Waltham, Mass.-based company wants its (...)
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Google fires top AI ethics researcher Margaret Mitchell - 20 février 2021
Google has fired Margaret Mitchell, the founder and former co-lead of the company’s ethical AI team. Mitchell announced the news via a tweet.
Google confirmed Mitchell’s firing in a statement to TechCrunch ; Google said :
After conducting a review of this manager’s conduct, we confirmed that there were multiple (...)
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Minneapolis police tapped Google to identify George Floyd protesters - 9 février 2021
The warrant ordered the search giant to turn over user account data.
Police in Minneapolis obtained a search warrant ordering Google to turn over sets of account data on vandals accused of sparking violence in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd last year, TechCrunch has learned.
The death of Floyd, a (...)
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Amazon to pay $61.7M to settle FTC complaint over stolen Amazon Flex driver tips - 3 février 2021
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission announced today that Amazon will be required to pay $61.7 million to settle charges that it withheld some customer tips from its Amazon Flex drivers over a two and a half year period. According to the complaint against Amazon and its subsidiary Amazon Logistics, the company had (...)
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A prison video visitation service exposed private calls between inmates and their attorneys - 15 janvier 2021
Thousands of calls were spilling from an unprotected server.
Fearing the spread of coronavirus, jails and prisons remain on lockdown. Visitors are unable to see their loved ones serving time, forcing friends and families to use prohibitively expensive video visitation services that often don’t work.
But now the (...)
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Google, Cisco and VMware join Microsoft to oppose NSO Group in WhatsApp spyware case - 22 décembre 2020
A coalition of companies have filed an amicus brief in support of a legal case brought by WhatsApp against Israeli intelligence firm NSO Group, accusing the company of using an undisclosed vulnerability in the messaging app to hack into at least 1,400 devices, some of which were owned by journalists and human (...)
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China’s internet regulator takes aim at forced data collection - 4 décembre 2020
China is a step closer to cracking down on unscrupulous data collection by app developers. This week, the country’s cybersecurity watchdog began seeking comment on the range of user information that apps from instant messengers to ride-hailing services are allowed to collect.
The move follows in the footstep of a (...)
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Gifting a gadget ? Check its creep factor on Mozilla’s ‘Privacy not included’ list of shame - 17 novembre 2020
Buying someone a gadget is a time-honored tradition, but these days it can be particularly fraught, considering you may buy them a fitness tracker that also monitors emotions, or a doorbell that snitches to the cops. Mozilla has put together a helpful list of popular gadgets with ratings on just how creepy they (...)
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Walmart and Cruise partner to test autonomous grocery delivery in Arizona - 10 novembre 2020
U.S. retailer Walmart and autonomous vehicle company Cruise are pairing up to test grocery delivery in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Under the pilot program, customers will be able to place an order from their local Walmart store and have it delivered via one of Cruise’s autonomous, electric Chevy Bolt cars. While the (...)
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IAB Europe’s ad tracking consent framework found to fail GDPR standard - 24 octobre 2020
A flagship framework for gathering Internet users’ consent for targeting with behavioral ads — which is designed by ad industry body, the IAB Europe — fails to meet the required legal standards of data protection, according to findings by its EU data supervisor.
The Belgian DPA’s investigation follows complaints (...)
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Facebook sues two companies engaged in data scraping operations - 2 octobre 2020
Facebook today says it has filed a lawsuit in the U.S. against two companies that had engaged in an international “data scraping” operation. The operation extended across Facebook properties, including both Facebook and Instagram, as well as other large websites and services, including Twitter, Amazon, LinkedIn and (...)
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Europe starts testing app interoperability service to power cross-border COVID-19 exposure alerts - 14 septembre 2020
The European Commission has begun testing backend infrastructure that’s needed to make national coronavirus contacts tracing apps interoperate across the bloc’s internal borders.
It’s kicked off test runs between the backend servers of the official apps from the Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Italy and (...)
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Former NSA chief General Keith Alexander is now on Amazon’s board - 9 septembre 2020
General Keith Alexander, who oversaw the National Security Agency when Edward Snowden revealed the shocking extent of its illegal wiretapping and data collection programs, has joined Amazon’s board as a director.
Gen. Alexander’s duties on the audit committee and anywhere else he might be needed are not spelled out (...)
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EU websites’ use of Google Analytics and Facebook Connect targeted by post-Schrems II privacy complaints - 18 août 2020
A month after Europe’s top court struck down a flagship data transfer arrangement between the EU and the US as unsafe, European privacy campaign group, noyb, has filed complaints against 101 websites with regional operators which it’s identified as still sending data to the US via Google Analytics and/or Facebook (...)
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Adtech giant Criteo is being investigated by France’s data watchdog - 3 juillet 2020
Adtech giant Criteo is under investigation by the French data protection watchdog, the CNIL, following a complaint filed by privacy rights campaign group Privacy International.
“I can confirm that the CNIL has opened up an investigation into Criteo . We are in the trial phase, so we can’t communicate at this (...)
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Antitrust case against Facebook’s ‘super profiling’ back on track after German federal court ruling - 3 juillet 2020
A landmark regulatory intervention that seeks to apply structural antitrust remedies to cut big (ad)tech’s rights-hostile surveillance business models down to size has been revived after Germany’s federal court overturned an earlier ruling that had suspended enforcement of a ban on Facebook combining user data into (...)
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After merger, T-Mobile lays off hundreds of Sprint employees - 25 juin 2020
In a conference call on Monday lasting under six minutes, T-Mobile vice president James Kirby told hundreds of Sprint employees that their services were no longer needed. He declined to answer his employees’ questions, citing the “personal” nature of employee feedback, and ended the call.
TechCrunch obtained leaked (...)
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UK’s COVID-19 health data contracts with Google and Palantir finally emerge - 10 juin 2020
Contracts for a number of coronavirus data deals that the U.K. government inked in haste with U.S. tech giants, including Google and Palantir, plus a U.K.-based AI firm called Faculty, have been published today by openDemocracy and law firm Foxglove — which had threatened legal action for withholding the (...)
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Facebook wants content reviewers back ASAP, slows return plan for most employees | TechCrunch - 17 avril 2020
On his personal Facebook account, Mark Zuckerberg offered an update on the company’s roadmap for bringing employees back to work in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.
In the post, he acknowledged that while it might be possible for a small portion of “critical employees” unable to do their work remotely to return (...)
