Meta will hold back about $5.3bn of its teen safety settlement. The money moves only if TikTok and YouTube adopt the same rules and pay matching sums. The company set out the structure in a newsroom post on Wednesday, hours after agreeing to settle the…
Meta has agreed to pay a maximum of $16.68bn to settle claims brought by states across the country. They alleged the company designed Facebook and Instagram to addict children, misled consumers about their safety, and improperly collected the personal …
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…
Alabama has asked OpenAI to name every employee who has ever raised a safety concern about any model test. Not the Hugging Face evaluation. Any of them, at any point, with no date limit attached. That is request eight of sixteen in a subpoena the state…
The US Environmental Protection Agency has proposed making public disclosure of air pollution from minor sources voluntary rather than mandatory, a change that would cover the diesel generators clustered around data centres. It follows the same directi…
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…
Japan is studying whether to move the settlement of stocks and government bonds onto blockchain infrastructure capable of running in real time around the clock, according to Nikkei, in a project involving the Financial Services Agency, the Ministry of …
Brazil has fined TikTok’s owner over the way it handled children’s data, and the ruling covers people who never had an account. The National Data Protection Agency imposed a penalty of 153.7 million reais on ByteDance on Tuesday, worth about $29.9m. It…
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…