Category: Regulatory News
Monsanto must pay $857 million over PCB exposure at a Washington school
A US jury has ordered Bayer subsidiary Monsanto to pay $857 million (£676 million) to seven people – including former students and parent volunteers at a school in Washington state – who said they were sickened by exposure to polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) that the company sold. The PBCs were apparently used in fire safety fluid in the school that leaked from its light fixtures, and the plaintiffs reported neurological, endocrine and other health problems. Monsanto explains that the claims in…
CNIL Fines Apple 8 Million Euros Over Personalized Ads
On December 29, 2022, the French Data Protection Authority (the “CNIL”) announced that it imposed an €8,000,000 fine on Apple for violations of the French rules on targeted advertising and the use of cookies and similar tracking technologies. Background The CNIL received a complaint concerning Apple’s ad personalization practices on the App Store and carried out several investigations between 2021 and 2022. The CNIL’s investigations concluded that Apple was collecting the identifiers of users that visited the App Store using…
TikTok employees spied on journalists investigating social network
An internal investigation by parent company ByteDance confirms that employees obtained personal data from reporters who were probing Beijing’s influence on the app’s activities ByteDance, the Chinese technology giant that owns TikTok, admitted Thursday that several employees of the social network spied on journalists from Forbes magazine who were investigating the link between the company’s US branch and China. The information first came to light in October but was confirmed on December 23 by Forbes, which had access to an…
Mark Zuckerberg-Backed Byju’s Accused Of Buying Children’s Data and Threatening Parents
Meta Platforms Inc CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative-backed Byju’s —India’s largest online education firm — has been accused of bullying parents to buy courses. What Happened: India’s National Commission for Protection of Child Rights, or NCPCR, said the edtech company is targeting first-generation learners and forcing parents to buy courses after purchasing their phone numbers, ANI reported. Priyank Kanoongo, the chairperson of NCPCR, said that the body has initiated action and will send a report to the government. “We came…
Epic Games Inc., Developer of Fortnite Video Game, Agrees to $275 Million Penalty and Injunction for Alleged Violations of Children’s Privacy Law
The Department of Justice, together with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), today announced a settlement that, if approved by a federal court, will require Epic Games Inc. (Epic Games) to pay $275 million in civil penalties as part of a settlement to resolve alleged violations of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA Rule), and the Federal Trade Commission Act. Epic Games will also be subject to a permanent injunction regarding children’s personal…
Portuguese Data Protection Authority fines the National Institute of Statistics € 4.3 million
On 2 November 2022, the Portuguese Data Protection Authority (“CNPD”) issued a Decision imposing a fine of € 4,300,000 (four million three hundred euros) to the National Institute of Statistics (“INE”) for multiple violations in the processing of data subjects’ sensitive data during the Census 2021 operation. Background On the 27th of April 2021, after launching an investigation into the transfer of personal data from INE to Cloudflare (a U.S. service provider engaged by INE for the operation of the…
Ocenture LLC and Carelumina LLC Settle Allegations of Kickbacks, Genetic Testing Fraud Scheme
Ocenture LLC, a privately held company headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida, and its subsidiary, Carelumina LLC (collectively, “Ocenture”), have agreed to pay $3 million to resolve allegations that they caused the submission of false claims to Medicare by paying and receiving kickbacks in connection with genetic testing samples. The United States alleged that Ocenture participated in a genetic testing fraud scheme with other marketers and clinical laboratories. As part of the alleged scheme, Ocenture solicited genetic testing samples from Medicare beneficiaries…
Meta Slapped with €265 Million for Privacy Violations
On November 25, 2022, Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (“DPC”) released a decision fining Meta Platforms, Inc. (“Meta”) €265 million for a 2019 data leak involving the personal information of approximately 533 million Facebook users worldwide. In the decision, the DPC argued that Meta failed to comply with the GDPR’s requirement of providing privacy “by design and default” when it failed to prevent the disclosure of users’ phone numbers, email addresses, full names, dates of birth and other personal information on…
Twitter to Pay $150 Million Civil Penalty to Resolve Data Privacy Violations
May 31, 2022. The Department of Justice, together with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), announced a settlement that, if approved by a federal court, will require Twitter Inc. to pay $150 million in civil penalties and implement robust compliance measures to protect users’ data privacy. The settlement will resolve allegations that Twitter violated the FTC Act and an administrative order issued by the FTC in March 2011 by misrepresenting how it would make use of users’ nonpublic contact information. In…
CDC bought data harvested from millions of phones to monitor trends not related to COVID-19
May 10, 2022. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) bought access to location data harvested from tens of millions of phones in the United States to perform analysis of compliance with curfews, track patterns of people visiting K-12 schools, and specifically monitor the effectiveness of policy in the Navajo Nation, according to CDC documents obtained by Motherboard. The documents also show that although the CDC used COVID-19 as a reason to buy access to the data more quickly,…
Clearview AI settlement: Will stop selling facial recognition tool to private firms and continue working with law enforcement
May 9, 2022. Facial recognition company Clearview AI has agreed to stop its sales to private companies in the United States as part of a landmark settlement reining in a technology criticized as threatening Americans’ privacy rights. The settlement, filed Monday in federal court in Illinois, marks the most significant court action yet against Clearview AI, a company known for downloading billions of people’s photos from social networks and other websites to build a face-search database sold to law enforcement….
New records show DHS are buying & using cell phone location data
The ACLU published thousands of pages of previously unreleased records showing that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) are sidestepping the constitutional right against unreasonable government search and seizure. DHS has been buying access to and using large volumes of cell phone location information that has been “quietly extracted from smartphone apps” of U.S. citizens and others — using their own tax dollars. In 2018, the Supreme Court ruled in Carpenter v. United States that the government needs a warrant…
