Fearing a data breach, the data protection agency of Hamburg, a state in Germany, has warned its citizens not to use the Zoom video conferencing app. The authorities said that Zoom’s sending data back to the US for processing is a violation of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR). The agency had to issue a public warning after the Senate Chancellery failed to provide adequate responses to earlier concerns.
Source: Techcrunch
A lawsuit has been filed against WeChat and its parent organisation Tencent, by prosecutors in Beijing. The complaint stated that WeChat’s “Youth Mode” breached China’s child protection laws. Other Chinese regulatory agencies could file related lawsuits based on the findings. China has recently ramped up efforts to better protect minors online. QQ, another Tencent subsidiary, was also fined for violation of the same laws.
Twitter recently informed a local Court that it had appointed a chief compliance officer cum resident grievance officer, and hired a nodal contact person as per the new IT Rules of India. The appointment comes two months after the regulations have been implemented. Twitter had previously breached the timelines for compliance with the new regulations, that were in effect from May 26, which resulted in it losing the immunity granted to internet intermediaries.
An investigation has been started by Amazon after 550 employees of AWS signed a petition against harassment, discrimination, bullying, and bias against women and under-represented groups. It was also pointed out in the petition that Amazon’s system to investigate claims of discrimination is not fair, objective, or transparent. Cases of discrimination against, former employees like Cindy Warner have also been cited in the petition.
Some of the most popular websites and apps all over the world including UPS, FedEx, Airbnb, Fidelity, and the PlayStation Network went down on Thursday. The incident happened after Akamai reported an issue with their Edge DNS. The cause of which is still under investigation. Akamai denied any cyberattack. They have implemented a fix for the issue and the service is resuming normal operations.
After the recent allegations of the spyware sold by Israeli cyber firm NSO being abused on a global scale, an inter-ministerial team has been set up to “look into” the matter. Israel’s National Security Council is heading this team. NSO has denied the allegations and said the claims were just assumptions made by journalists and Pegasus software is used only to fight terrorism and crime.
Mastercard has been denied from having new clients in India from July 22, 2021, by the RBI. All three categories of debit, credit, and prepaid have been restricted. The restriction comes after Mastercard violated the central bank’s norms on the storage of payment systems data in India despite being given considerable time and enough opportunities. RBI said, the existing customers will not be affected and all banks will be informed about the restrictions.
Microblogging platform Twitter saw a rise in demands from the govt for the removal of content of journalists and news outlets. 199 verified accounts of journalists and news outlets faced 361 content removal legal demands. Five such tweets were removed. Globally India had the maximum reports. Last year, Twitter received 14,500 requests for info and 38,500 requests for content removal. Twitter’s tech is identifying 65% of abusive content for human review.
French antitrust watchdog has fined Google with 500mn euros for failing to comply fully with temporary orders the regulator had given in a row with the country’s news publishers. In the next two months, Google either comes up with how to compensate news agencies or pay fines of 900,000 euros per day. Major news publishers APIG, SEPM, and AFP accuse the tech company of not discussing the monetization of news content online.
