Facebook has been fined £500,000 ($645,000) by the United Kingdom today over the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The miniscule fine was the most allowed under the law, but Facebook can probably find that kind of money in its couch cushions. Based on last year’s revenue, Facebook makes $645,000 in less than 9 minutes of…
The European Union passed its disastrous Copyright Directive this week, including amended versions of its onerous Articles 11 and 13 (the so-called “link tax” and “upload filter,” respectively). There’s still time to make sure it never passes into law by defeating a final ratification vote in January, though given the …
Google has been subject to the EU Court of Justice’s “right to be forgotten” law—a requirement that search engines delist requested pages from results—for years. The law enables anyone in the EU to pressure companies like Google to take down search results they don’t like. But this week, Google is pushing back against…
After Apple announced plans to acquire Shazam at the end of 2017, the deal was put on hold when the EU launched an antitrust investigation to determine if it would decrease competition between streaming music providers.
Considering Android’s massive mobile market share, this was pretty much an inevitability. But today it finally happened for real: The EU slapped Google’s parent company Alphabet with a record fine of nearly $5.1 billion for violating European antitrust regulations.
The second day of a three-day strike by Amazon warehouse workers near Madrid coinciding with the e-commerce giant’s Prime Day promotion escalated significantly on Tuesday, with trade unions telling Spanish newspaper Público that police in riot gear had charged the strikers multiple times on supposed grounds they were…
The European Commission is giving citizens of the European Union the opportunity to cast their vote in a public poll that could lead to the elimination of the sleep-depriving practice of changing clocks twice a year for the sake of daylight saving time.
Last month, members of European Parliament voted to move forward with a sweeping overhaul of the European Union’s copyright laws that critics say will impede the spread of news, kill memes, bolster tech giants, and stifle innovation. Ahead of the final vote this week, Wikipedia Italy has joined protests across the…
Facebook has been on the receiving end of a lot of government scrutiny in recent months, but it looks like Google’s turn is coming soon. According to a report from Politico, the European Commission is preparing to hand down its decision on an antitrust investigation into the search giant’s Android mobile operating…
The European Commission is proposing a ban on around 10 single-use plastic items that it says account for approximately 70 percent of all garbage in the European Union’s waters and beaches, including cutlery, straws, cotton buds, plates, some coffee cups, and stirrers, CNN Money reported on Monday.
In the run-up to Friday’s launch of the new GDPR privacy protections, most of the focus has been on how it will affect huge data-mining tech giants like Google and Facebook. But as many people are finding out today, GDPR applies to any site that collects user data or, in the case of publishers like Gizmodo Media…
The European Union’s digital privacy law, known as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), officially went into effect today. But some websites in the U.S. have decided to block their services entirely rather than adhere to the new regulations. Dozens of American newspapers are currently blocked in Europe and…
Instapaper has informed its European users that it will temporarily cut off their access to the platform starting today. The reason? This Pinterest-owned service needs more than the two years it had to comply with the European Union’s new batch of privacy rules that go into effect on May 25. Sorry, Europe!
When Mark Zuckerberg testified in front of members of Congress last month, he made many of them look like out-of-touch idiots. But he may not be so lucky today. The Facebook CEO will be testifying in front of a European Parliament committee, and they’re expected to actually ask him some tough questions.
While the Department of Justice battles Time Warner and AT&T in court to block one mega merger, another business deal is getting held up by officials overseas. On Monday, the European Commission announced that it is has opened an anti-trust investigation into Apple’s buyout of Shazam, potentially postponing the…
Facebook may be having a very bad week stateside and in the UK over its Cambridge Analytica data scandal, but over in the continental European Union officials are maintaining that fellow tech giant Google may ultimately need to be broken up, lest it swallow the internet whole.
The European Union really wants tech companies to get their shit together when it comes to policing content on their platforms. On Thursday, it issued new guidelines for how companies like Twitter, Google, and Facebook should handle illegal content on its European websites: quickly, proactively, and with human…
Google has now been complying with the European Union’s controversial “right to be forgotten” laws, which the European Court of Justice first ruled applied to search engines in 2014, for three years. On Monday, the search giant released an updated version of its annual Transparency Report, which discloses how many and…
A few months before the EU enacts substantial new privacy rules, and just in time for Data Privacy Day, Facebook has both revamped privacy controls for users to make them simpler and published its internal “privacy principles,” which detail the company’s commitment to protecting user data.
Qualcomm’s legal troubles are only getting worse. Already embroiled in several lawsuits with Apple, Qualcomm was fined $1.2 billion (997 million euros) today by the European Union for violating antitrust regulations.
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