privacy
After an investigation exposes its dangers, Pinterest announces new safety tools and parental controls
Following last month’s NBC News investigation into Pinterest that exposed how pedophiles had been using the service to curate image boards of young girls, the company on Tuesday announced further…
Alcohol recovery startups Monument and Tempest shared patients’ private data with advertisers
For years, online alcohol recovery startups Monument and Tempest were sharing with advertisers the personal information and health data of their patients without their consent. Monument, which acquired Tempest in…
Parents are still looking for answers weeks after hackers stole the personal data of thousands of users from kids’ tech coding camp iD Tech, with some fearing that their children’s…
Firefox announced today that its Total Cookie Protection (TCP) feature that protects users from trackers is now available on Android. The feature, which will be turned on by default, will…
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Today’s startups should terrify you
A steady stream of new startups pitch their ideas, concepts, products and services on a daily basis to TechCrunch reporters: Startups that claim to predict when employees might want to leave for a new job; that think they can detect depression using someone’s voice; that experiment by using chatbots on patients with depression; that scrape…
Twitter’s Tor service, a version of the site that could be accessed even in countries where the social network is banned, has gone dark after the company failed to renew…
Popular Android apps’ Play Store privacy labels don’t match up to their claims, Mozilla says
Google added privacy nutrition labels for apps on the Play Store last April, bringing more transparency to its Android marketplace in response to Apple introducing similar stringent rules. These labels…
Tile takes extreme steps to limit stalkers and thieves from using its Bluetooth trackers
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…
FTC slaps $1.5M fine on GoodRx for sharing users’ health data with Facebook and Google
Online pharmacy GoodRx has agreed to pay $1.5 million in civil penalties for years of sharing the health information of consumers with third parties like Facebook, Google and Criteo for…
In late April, police in Nebraska received a tip saying 17-year-old Celeste Burgess had given birth to a stillborn baby and buried the body. Officers soon learned that her mother,…
Biden’s call to ‘unite against big tech abuses’ sure sounds familiar
President Biden published an op-ed yesterday in the Wall Street Journal putting Big Tech on notice that his administration was working — in fact, has been working — to rein…
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Robot or fauxbot?
This is my week of debriefs. CES has a way of hurling you into the new year, kicking and screaming, and it can be hard to find your bearings as you emerge on the other side. As the dust has cleared, one thing remains very clear: No two people have the same notion of what…
This holiday season, consider giving the gift of security with an ad blocker. That’s the takeaway message from an unlikely source — the FBI — which this week issued an…
Facebook to now test age verification tech on Facebook Dating in the US
Meta is bringing its age verification technologies to another of its products, Facebook Dating. Though the service has not taken off as a significant Tinder rival, it will now serve…
Snapchat complies with the California Privacy Rights Act with a new toggle switch for users
Snapchat is adding a new privacy setting that enables users based in California to better protect their sensitive personal information. The company confirmed it’s rolling out a feature designed to…
Google to pay $391.5 million in location tracking settlement with 40 states
Google has agreed to a $391.5 million settlement with 40 state attorneys general over its location tracking practices. The settlement outlines that Google misled its users into thinking they had…
Twitter safety head suggests further ‘identity verification’ beyond paid verification may later be required
Twitter’s head of Safety and Integrity Yoel Roth admitted in a Twitter thread that the company may have to further invest in “identity verification” that goes beyond the paid verification…
DataGrail announces automated risk assessment tool and $45M investment
DataGrail has always focused on helping companies comply with the growing world of privacy regulation, building plug-ins to common data-heavy applications to help automate data discovery and compliance. Today, it’s…
Google rolls out tool to request removal of personal info from search results, will later add proactive alerts
This spring, Google announced it would expand the types of personal information users could request to have removed from Google Search results to include contact information, like a phone number,…
Facebook users sue Meta, accusing the company of tracking on iOS through a loophole
Apple’s major privacy update to iOS last year made it much more difficult for apps to track user behavior beyond their own borders, but a new lawsuit alleges that Facebook…
DataGuard locks down $61M for data protection as a service
Companies are facing hundreds of millions of dollars in fines these days for failing to comply with data protection and data privacy rules, and that’s driving wave of organizations, and their…
Morgan Stanley to pay $35M after hard drives with 15M customers’ personal data turn up in auction
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has agreed to settle charges against Morgan Stanley Smith Barney (MSSB) for its “astonishing” failure to protect the personal identifying information of some 15…
Advisor to Europe’s top court backs antitrust watchdogs looking at privacy
A non-binding opinion issued today by an influential advisor to the Europe Union’s top court could foreshadow a major regional development at the intersection of privacy and competition regulation —…
Unsealed docs in Facebook privacy suit offer glimpse of missing app audit
It’s not the crime, it’s the cover up… The scandal-hit company formerly known as Facebook has fought for over four years to keep a lid on the gory details of…
iOS 16 lands today with these five new security and privacy features
Apple’s long-awaited iOS 16 update for iPhones lands Monday with new security and privacy features, aimed at preventing spyware, protecting users against domestic and spousal abuse and replacing passwords that let…
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Adtech’s compliance theatre is headed to Europe’s top court
For those watching the slow motion unpicking of surveillance advertising in the European Union here’s a fresh development on the long and winding road to a long-overdue legal reckoning: Multiple grounds for appeal lodged by industry body, the IAB Europe, against a breach finding earlier this year against its self-proclaimed “best practice” framework for obtaining…
Daily Crunch: PSG, Battery Ventures invest $100M in open source password manager Bitwarden
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A fat fine — of €405 million — is headed Instagram’s way after European Union privacy regulators came to a decision on a long-running complaint related to how the social…
UK closely probing four tech firms over kids’ privacy code breaches
The U.K. could be gearing up to hit a handful of tech firms with enforcement orders (and potentially fines) related to a children’s online privacy and safety Code which has…
Daily Crunch: Snap lays off one-fifth of its workforce after missing revenue and growth targets
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