Prepare for another encryption battle: After parliament approved its Online Safety Bill yesterday, the U.K. government is pressuring Meta not to roll out end-to-end encryption (E2EE) on Facebook Messenger and Instagram unless it applies unspecified “safety measures” that the Home Secretary said should allow law enforcement to continue to detect …

Calendarize it. European pals: July 4th could become independence-from-Meta-surveillance-capitalism day. Today’s long-awaited Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) ruling appears to have destroyed the social media giant’s ability to violate EU privacy law by denying users a choice over its tracking and profiling. The ruling stems from a …

Meta, formerly Facebook, has been ordered to stop exporting EU user data to the U.S. The European Data Protection Board (EDPB) fined Meta €1.2 billion (close to $1.3 billion) today, the largest GDPR fine ever. Amazon was fined $887 million in 2021 for misusing customer data for ad targeting. Meta …

Today, YouTube Premium, the $11.99 ad-free version of YouTube, is adding features to attract and retain customers. Most significantly, the subscription plan will now include higher-quality video for web and iOS users, support for co-watching videos on FaceTime using Apple’s SharePlay, and mobile queue controls. Although many people don’t know …

AI photo apps: over? AI-powered photo apps like Lensa AI’s “magic avatars” and others that promise to turn text into images have gone viral on the App Store in recent months. Apptopia data shows consumer interest in AI photo apps has fallen as quickly as it rose. The firm tracked …

Charging a battery In an effort to start up its $1.6 billion gigafactory, Our Next Energy announced this morning that it had closed a sizable $300 million Series B round. The two-and-a-half-year-old company, which closed a $25 million Series A in October 2021 and a $65 million Series A1 in …

Following trials last year in Germany, European telcos are moving forward with a plan to establish a joint venture to provide opt-in “personalized” ad targeting of regional mobile network consumers. However, it is yet unclear whether European Union officials will approve of their proposal. Germany’s Deutsche Telekom, France’s Orange, Spain’s …

Tens of thousands of iPhones and Android devices, the most of whose owners are unaware that their data has been compromised, have had data taken by the little-known phone surveillance program Xnspy. Xnspy is one of many “stalkerware” apps that are marketed for spying on a spouse or domestic partner’s …

A lose-lose dilemma exists. Others lose money by distributing it on their own networks, while some streamers lose money by paying to have material on their platforms. The outcome? price increases The cost of streaming services just keeps rising. This year, pricing increases were announced by Netflix, Hulu, Disney Plus, …

Independent legal analysis of the Online Safety Bill, a contentious UK government proposal to regulate online speech under a safety-focused framework, says the draft bill contains some of the broadest mass surveillance powers ever proposed in a Western democracy and also warns that they pose a risk to the integrity …