Texas just made history – and is probably making Big Tech pretty nervous – by landing a $1.3 billion settlement of two suits it had brought against Google. These claimed the company tracked user location deceptively, collected biometrics, and misled consumers who thought they had privacy in “Incognito” browsing mode. It’s the largest privacy settlement to date brought by a US state.
Or maybe you feel safer. In either case, without fanfare (or advance notice) the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spent the holiday formalizing a change to the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database (originally designed to check immigration status of noncitizens), to vastly expand of who it can check on and what data can be entered, searched and shared. The big change is adding voter information so the Trump Administration can more easily purge voter records.
The Court of Justice of the EU (ECJ) just clarified when pseudonymized data is or isn’t considered personal data under GDPR. So, if you handle, share or receive any, check your data sharing, documentation, and contracts to ensure you comply.
Meta has announced agreements with USA Today, People Inc., and other news publishers to pay for access to their content and link to their articles in its AI chatbot. It’s a sharp contrast to Perplexity, which the Chicago Tribune and New York Times are separately suing for allegedly scraping content and bypassing paywalls. Despite this deal, Meta apparently still opposes compensating publishers for news links in social media posts.