Luxembourg’s data protection authority has charged Amazon €746 million ($888 million) for violating EU GDPR data protection rules. Amazon, which is also under scrutiny in Europe for antitrust, claims this is ‘without merit,’ and plans to appeal.
All that fancy AI is nice but most companies would be happy just to make customer interactions a bit less taxing – through a good messaging system, for example. Gupshup has built a $150 million business on that premise, and just raised $240 million to grow it further, bringing total funding to $384 million. The funding announcement includes a singularly unimpressive chatbot named Gupper that answers a few questions about the deal.
Despite denying wrongdoing, Zoom has agreed to pay $86 million to settle a US class action alleging it violated privacy by sharing personal data of millions of its users with Facebook, Google and LinkedIn. It was also blamed for misrepresenting its security encryption and not stopping hackers from “zoombombing.”
The U.S. Senate has passed a bill that could potentially ban TikTok in the U.S. if its Chinese owner, ByteDance, does not sell its holdings within a year. The bill now goes to the President Biden, who has said he will sign it. Court challenges are likely to follow.