President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, responds to an open letter from Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner about regulating large tech companies. She writes that the political power of tech giants needs to be limited, and lays out steps the European Union is already taking to protect […]

The Irish Data Protection Commission fined Twitter $US546,000 for violating the EU’s GDPR privacy law and failing to notify the regulator of a data breach within 72 hours of one occurring. The case pertains to a breach during the 2018 holiday period that left users’ private tweets exposed, an incident […]

H&M has been fined 35 million euros ($US41.1 million) by a German watchdog after monitoring “several hundred employees” at its service centre in Nuremberg, Germany. This is the second-largest fine levied against a single company over data breaches after the EU introduced new General Data Protection Regulation laws in 2018. […]

US gross domestic product slumped at a record 33% annualized rate in the second quarter, according to figures released Thursday. The report reflected April, May, and June, a period that captures both the sweeping lockdowns to contain coronavirus and states’ earliest reopening efforts. Here’s what five economists had to say […]

Controversial facial recognition firm Clearview AI was hit with a data privacy complained filed to France’s privacy regulator on Wednesday. Clearview AI is a US facial recognition company with a database made up of billions of photos scraped from the internet. It sells access to this database to law enforcement […]

A grandma in Holland has been ordered by a court to take pictures of her grandchildren off Facebook and Pinterest. The children’s mother – also the grandma’s daughter – had asked before for her to take the pictures down as she didn’t want pictures of the children exhibited on social […]

Facebook recently launched its in-app dating feature in the United States, and was scheduled to launch it in Europe the day before Valentine’s Day. However, Facebook Dating’s European rollout has been delayed, as first reported by the Wall Street Journal. Privacy regulators in Ireland – where Facebook’s European headquarters are […]

Tech executives’ top concerns for 2020 are workforce issues, healthcare, and data privacy, according to a recent survey from PricewaterhouseCoopers. Their priorities reflect how workers and consumers’ relationships with tech companies are changing, driven in part by new business models – from digital ads to the sharing economy – that […]

Technology platforms like Google and Facebook are raking in record revenues from helping advertisers use personal information to target ads, as the industry continues to grow. At the same time, an overwhelming majority of Americans are concerned about companies harvesting their personal information and say the risks outweigh the benefits, […]

American whistleblower and activist Edward Snowden has compared the business models of tech giants such as Facebook, Google and Amazon to “abuse.” Snowden, who is renowned for copying and leaking highly classified information from the National Security Agency while working as a CIA employee and subcontractor, was speaking at the […]

Hello! Welcome to the Advertising and Media Insider newsletter, where we round up interesting stories and scoops from us over the past week, ICYMI. I’m Tanya Dua, a senior advertising reporter, filling in for Lucia this week. If you got this email forwarded, sign up for your own here. Got […]

Giovanni Buttarelli, the European Data Protection Supervisor, has died at the age of 62. Buttarelli was instrumental in overseeing the introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe. Apple CEOTim Cook was among those who mourned his death. “Giovanni was a great man, and we are forever in […]

The UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) plans to finehotel giant Marriott International £99 million (about $US123 million) for a data breach that exposed the sensitive data of 339 million guests. The breach occurred in 2014 in hotel company Starwood’s database. Marriott inherited the undetected breach when it bought Starwood in […]

Prince Harry won a legal dispute with Splash News, a photo agency which used a helicopter to take pictures inside his home. As well as arguing that they invaded his privacy, the Duke of Sussex also based his case on the photographers having mishandled his personal data under Europe’s new […]

Facebook harvested 1.5 million users’ email contact data without their consent, Business Insider reported on Wednesday. In doing so, Facebook might have violated US and EU laws, experts say. The social network said it unintentionally collected the contacts and is now deleting them. The company is already under investigation by […]

On Thursday, Transcend launched with a $US3.95 million seed round led by Accel. Transcend focuses on data privacy by gives users more control over their data by making it easier for them to see how apps are using their personal data and downloading it. Transcend CEO Ben Brook co-founded Transcend […]

Some 11 popular apps are sharing the highly personal data they collect with Facebook, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday. Among the data the apps shared with Facebook were users’ weight and whether they were menstruating, according to the report. The apps generally didn’t give users an easy way to […]