A UK class action alleges Facebook coerced 45 million users into providing personal data that resulted in billions gained in ad revenue for Meta, but no benefit for users. This follows a similar EU case that found Facebook in violation of GDPR but did not focus on monetary harms as this does. The case still must be certified by the UK Competition Appeal Tribunal before proceeding.
Return on investment is important but what about sustainability? Well, 95% of IT leaders said it’s high priority for their own companies and when picking suppliers. But 87% said they’d ultimately prioritize commercial objectives over sustainability when faced with economic challenges. Are you surprised?
While the US still doesn’t have a federal data privacy law, it does have the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPN) – a video rental-era holdover of a law that disallows sharing video viewership data without consent. Chick-Fil-A, which has been using a Meta pixel tracker for an ongoing series of Christmas videos, is facing a class action similar to VPPA lawsuits brought against nearly 50 other organizations, including the NBA, GameStop, CNN and BuzzFeed.
Microsoft has confirmed that Reddit has blocked its Bing search engine from crawling content; Reddit seems to have blocked DuckDuckGo too. Reddit content will still appear in Google search results, but then Google has paid Reddit $60 million to allow it to train its AI models on that content. Reddit says the block has nothing to do with the Google deal: okay.