Mark Keenan reports: Google has failed to explain adequately to the data protection authorities why it has not deleted sensitive data it collected illicitly from Irish businesses and households throughout Ireland during its 2009 sweep of the country for its Street View project. The multinational caused controversy when it emerged that it had scanned commercially…
Category: Business
Facebook User Asks Appeals Court To Revive Privacy Lawsuit
Back in June 2010, Mike Robertson sued Facebook in federal court over leaking user information in referral headers. The complaint was amended in October 2010, but most of the case was dismissed in May 2011 and the rest of the case was dismissed in November for lack of demonstrable harm. Now Wendy Davis of MediaPost reports that…
Company Denies Role in Recently Uncovered Spyware
Nicole Perlroth reports: An executive at Gamma Group, a British company that sells surveillance technologies, denied on Wednesday that a spyware program running on servers in 11 countries is part of his company’s product line. Gamma Group makes FinFisher, spyware that, according to the company’s promotional materials, can be “used to access target systems, giving…
Germans reopen Facebook privacy inquiry, but what can they really do?
Kevin J. O’Brien reports: Data protection officials in Germany reopened an investigation into Facebook’s facial recognition technology Wednesday, saying the social networking giant was illegally compiling a vast photo database of users without their consent. The data protection commissioner in Hamburg, Johannes Caspar, said he had reopened his investigation, which he had suspended in June,…