From Sunday, a European news publisher that runs sponsored content on its site will no longer be at risk of a manual demotion in Google Search. Google confirmed the change on Friday, and Reuters reported that it is designed to settle a European Commiss…
Poland’s deputy prime minister and digital affairs minister Krzysztof Gawkowski has asked the European Commission to fine Meta €250M, roughly $291M, over scams and false advertising on Facebook and Instagram. “I also call on Meta to immediately introdu…
Pennsylvania has sued Snap over Snapchat. The case rests on a 13-year-old account, opened on a new iPhone by an investigator in the attorney general’s office before the filing. What that account could reach is the evidence. Attorney General David Sunda…
Amazon is closing Mechanical Turk on 30 September. The marketplace is 21 years old, and it paid people a few cents at a time to do work that computers could not. Jeff Bezos once called it “artificial artificial intelligence”. A banner across the MTurk …
X Corp has sent cease-and-desist letters to Nitter, the open-source project that let people read X posts without an account. Nitter.net is offline and development has stopped. Its creator says he is seeking legal advice. XCancel, the best-known site bu…
Some 87% of German companies were hit by data theft, espionage, or sabotage in the past twelve months, up from 81% a year earlier, according to the industry association Bitkom, which puts the resulting damage at €289.2bn. What is new in this year’s rep…
Foreign governments have tried to break into the messaging accounts of senior European Union officials. The bloc’s own cyber defence unit told national governments so in July. An internal presentation lists “account takeover targeting high-ranking offi…
Europe gave itself the right to bring class actions against big companies five years ago. Ireland hosts the European headquarters of most large technology firms, and campaigners there have managed exactly one. A law from 1634 explains why. Ellen O’Rega…
Spain has drafted a decree that would require new data centres to source at least 80% of their electricity from renewables in every hour of operation, with loss of grid connection as the penalty for failing to comply. It is a markedly firmer position t…
Someone inside Instagram proposed switching its break reminder on by default. The proposal was rejected because the cost to the app’s core metrics was not desirable. George Volichenko, a former Meta data scientist, told that to a jury in Oakland this w…