Category: Government
Indian police open case against hundreds in Kashmir for using VPN
Local authorities in India-controlled Kashmir have opened a case against hundreds of people who used virtual private networks (VPNs) to circumvent a social media ban in the disputed Himalayan region in a move that has been denounced by human rights and privacy activists. Tahir Ashraf, who heads the police cyber…
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Facebook asks for a moat of regulations it already meets
It’s suspiciously convenient that Facebook already fulfills most of the regulatory requirements it’s asking governments to lay on the rest of the tech industry. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is in Brussels lobbying the European Union’s regulators as they form new laws to govern artificial intelligence, content moderation, and more. But…
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Vodafone Idea shares tumble 23% after India orders it to pay billions in dues
Shares of Vodafone Idea fell by more than 23% on Friday after India’s apex court ordered the country’s second-largest telecom operator and Airtel, the third-largest telecom network, to arrange and pay billions of dollars in dues in a month. In a strongly worded judgement, the Supreme Court rejected telecom networks’…
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Class action suit against Clearview AI cites Illinois law that cost Facebook $550M
Just two weeks ago Facebook settled a lawsuit alleging violations of privacy laws in Illinois for the considerable sum of $550 million. Now controversial startup Clearview AI, which has gleefully admitted to scraping and analyzing the data of millions, is the target of a new lawsuit citing similar violations. Clearview…
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Surprise! Audit finds automated license plate reader programs are a privacy nightmare
Automated license plate readers, ALPRs, would be controversial even if they were responsibly employed by the governments that run them. Unfortunately, and to no one’s surprise, the way they actually operate is “deeply disturbing and confirm[s] our worst fears about the misuse of this data,” according to an audit of…
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Judge halts Microsoft work on JEDI contract after AWS request
A sealed order from a judge today has halted the $10 billion, decade long JEDI project in its tracks until AWS’s protest of the contract award to Microsoft can be heard by the court. The order signed by Judge Patricia E. Campbell-Smith of the US Court Federal Claims stated: The…
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