Is your air fryer spying on you? Concerns over ‘excessive’ surveillance in smart devices

Posted on November 4, 2024 by Admin

UK consumer group Which? finds some everyday items including watches and speakers are ‘stuffed with trackers’

Air fryers that gather your personal data and audio speakers “stuffed with trackers” are among examples of smart devices engaged in “excessive” surveillance, according to the consumer group Which?

The organisation tested three air fryers, increasingly a staple of British kitchens, each of which requested permission to record audio on the user’s phone through a connected app.

Google stops notifying publishers of ‘right to be forgotten’ removals from search results

Posted on February 15, 2024 by Admin

Move comes after Swedish court rules that informing webmasters about delisted content is breach of privacy

Google has quietly stopped telling publishers when it has removed websites from its search results under European “right to be forgotten” rules after a ruling in a Swedish court which the search engine is applying globally.

Previously, when an individual applied to have records about them expunged under EU data protection laws, Google would notify the publisher of the original articles.

TikTok fined €345m for breaking EU data law on children’s accounts

Posted on September 15, 2023 by Admin

Irish data regulator says platform put 13- to 17-year-old users’ accounts on default public setting, among other breaches

TikTok has been fined €345m (£296m) for breaking EU data law in its handling of children’s accounts, including failing to shield underage users’ content from public view.

The Irish data watchdog, which regulates TikTok across the EU, said the Chinese-owned video app had committed multiple breaches of GDPR rules.

Customer data used for unwanted romantic contact, UK poll shows

Posted on August 21, 2023 by Admin

Almost one in three people aged 18-34 have been messaged by staff after giving personal details to a business

Almost one in three people aged 18-34 have received unwanted romantic contact after giving their personal information to a business, a UK poll has shown.

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has called for recipients of such texts to come forward to help the regulator gather evidence of the impact of this phenomenon.

The ICO has an online form for people who want to report an experience of unwanted contact.

Facebook owner Meta fined €1.2bn for mishandling user information

Posted on May 22, 2023 by Admin

Penalty from Ireland’s privacy regulator is a record for breach of EU data protection regulation

Business live – latest updates

Facebook’s owner, Meta, has been fined a record €1.2bn (£1bn) and ordered to suspend the transfer of user data from the EU to the US.

The fine – equivalent to $1.3bn – imposed by Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC), which regulates Meta across the EU, is a record for a breach of the bloc’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Calls for stricter UK oversight of workplace AI amid fears for staff rights

Posted on April 16, 2023 by Admin

Campaigners, unions and MPs raise concerns about surveillance and use of ‘management by algorithm’

Campaigners, trade unions and MPs are calling for stricter oversight of the use of artificial intelligence in the workplace, amid growing concerns about its effect on staff rights.

The Trades Union Congress (TUC) is holding a half-day conference on Tuesday to highlight the challenges of ensuring workers are treated fairly, as what it calls “management by algorithm” becomes increasingly prevalent.

Seeing stones: pandemic reveals Palantir’s troubling reach in Europe

Posted on April 2, 2021 by Admin

Covid has given Peter Thiel’s secretive US tech company new opportunities to operate in Europe in ways some campaigners find worrying

The 24 March, 2020 will be remembered by some for the news that Prince Charles tested positive for Covid and was isolating in Scotland. In Athens it was memorable as the day the traffic went silent. Twenty-four hours into a hard lockdown, Greeks were acclimatising to a new reality in which they had to send an SMS to the government in order to leave the house. As well as millions of text messages, the Greek government faced extraordinary dilemmas. The European Union’s most vulnerable economy, its oldest population along with Italy, and one of its weakest health systems faced the first wave of a pandemic that overwhelmed richer countries with fewer pensioners and stronger health provision. The carnage in Italy loomed large across the Adriatic.

One Greek who did go into the office that day was Kyriakos Pierrakakis, the minister for digital transformation, whose signature was inked in blue on an agreement with the US technology company, Palantir. The deal, which would not be revealed to the public for another nine months, gave one of the world’s most controversial tech companies access to vast amounts of personal data while offering its software to help Greece weather the Covid storm. The zero-cost agreement was not registered on the public procurement system, neither did the Greek government carry out a data impact assessment – the mandated check to see whether an agreement might violate privacy laws.

Revealed: Facebook’s global lobbying against data privacy laws

Posted on March 2, 2019 by Admin

Social network targeted legislators around the world, promising or threatening to withhold investment

Facebook has targeted politicians around the world – including the former UK chancellor, George Osborne – promising investments and incentives while seeking to pressure them into lobbying on Facebook’s behalf against data privacy legislation, an explosive new leak of internal Facebook documents has revealed.

The documents, which have been seen by the Observer and Computer Weekly, reveal a secretive global lobbying operation targeting hundreds of legislators and regulators in an attempt to procure influence across the world, including in the UK, US, Canada, India, Vietnam, Argentina, Brazil, Malaysia and all 28 states of the EU. The documents include details of how Facebook: