Facebook and YouTube have recently affirmed that they will not change how they police political content on their platforms. In fact, both organisations have hinted at relaxing censorship by raising the threshold on what politicians can say before they will be found in violation of user codes.
In September 2019, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos unveiled the tech giant’s plans to develop its own draft legislation to regulate facial recognition technology. Amazon hopes to pitch this to lawmakers and for them to adopt its as many of its suggestions as possible.
Anthony Levandowski (a former engineer at Google) has been charged with 33 counts of attempted theft of trade secrets.
The Federal Trade Commission recently fined YouTube a record $170 million for targeting adverts at children after illegally harvesting their personal information.
Facebook and Google are facing investigations in the US for breaching antitrust laws. The new investigations are indicative of a trend of growing scrutiny of big tech firms in the US.
Apple contractors regularly hear confidential details on Siri recordings.
Facebook’s appeal against a class action case has been thrown out by a US federal appeals court in San Francisco. The lawsuit could go on to cost Facebook billions of dollars if they are found to have fallen foul of Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA).
Facebook agreed a record $5 billion settlement with the Federal Trade Commission that also imposed new obligations over how the tech giant handles personal data. However, the agreement also granted Facebook immunity and did not hold any of its officers personally liable.
The Law Society has been studying the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the legal services sector. In June this year, Law Society president Christina Blacklaws delivered the findings in her keynote speech.
The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) is considering allegations that FaceApp, the popular face-aging photo app, is misusing personal data.