After major privacy enforcement finally hit Meta’s tracking ads business in Europe earlier this year, the tech giant has confirmed it will be changing the legal basis it claims for microtargeting users in the region. It’s still not going to ask people for their up-front consent to its data-fuelled behavioral advertising. But it will have to […]
European Union lawmakers are on track to ban the use of remote biometric surveillance for general law enforcement purposes. However that hasn’t stopped parliamentarians in France voting to deploy AI to monitor public spaces for suspicious behavior during the 2024 Paris Olympics. On Thursday the parliament approved a plan to use automated behavioral surveillance of […]
In its latest piece of strategic litigation, the precision-punching European privacy rights campaign group noyb has used data donated by users of the ‘Who Targets me‘ browser extension, which analyzes political microtargeting on Facebook, to build a case against every political party in Germany — for what it alleges is unlawful processing of voters’ personal […]
Austria’s data protection authority has found that use of Meta’s tracking technologies violated EU data protection law as personal data was transferred to the US where the information was at risk from government surveillance. The finding flows from a swathe of complaints filed by European privacy rights group noyb, back in August 2020, which also […]
Privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo has followed Microsoft and Google to become the latest veteran search player to dip its beak in the generative AI trend — announcing the launch today in beta of an AI-powered summarization feature, called DuckAssist, which can directly answer straightforward search queries for users. DDG says it’s drawing on natural language […]
TikTok is doubling down on its European charm offensive today as it looks to counter a rising tide of political discontent with the popular short-form video-hosting platform. A new program called Project Clover will serve to create “a secure enclave for European TikTok user data,” wrote Theo Bertram, TikTok’s European VP of government relations and […]
Last month, Flutterwave, Africa’s largest startup by private valuation, was involved in a hack that resulted in over ₦2.9 billion (~$4.2 million) missing from its accounts, according to local tech publication Techpoint Africa. According to the documents seen by the publication and reviewed by TechCrunch, unknown actors transferred the funds across 28 accounts in 63 transactions […]
Metaverse hype was hanging like a multicolored fog over the Mobile World Congress (MWC) connectivity trade show in Barcelona this week. Conference organizer, the GSMA’s, program pitched attendees into a smorgasbord of metaverse-themed discussions — most of which seemed designed to generate maximum FOMO, as a parade of tech evangelists took to the stage in […]
Apple took a big PR hit as news spread that its item tracker the AirTag was being used for stalking and car thefts, which led the company to retool its software with a closer eye on user safety. AirTag’s competitor Tile is now introducing its own plan to make its device safer, with the launch […]
Google has begun letting Android developers kick the tyres of its claimed reboot of ad-targeting — announcing the launch of the first Beta for its “Privacy Sandbox”, an adtech stack proposal which aims to iterate how ad tracking, targeting and reporting is done so it appears less creepy for individual users while maintaining an interest-based, […]