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South Korea's privacy watchdog on Tuesday fined social media company Meta 21.6 billion won ($15 million) for illegally collecting sensitive personal information from Facebook users, including data about their political views and sexual orientation, and sharing it with thousands of advertisers. It was the latest in a series of penalties against Meta by South Korean authorities in recent years as they increase their scrutiny of how the company, which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, handles private information. Following a four-year investigation, South Korea's Personal Information Protection Commission concluded that Meta unlawfully collected sensitive information about around 980,000 Facebook users, including their religion, political views and whether they were in same-sex unions, from July 2018 to March 2022. It said the company shared the data with around 4,000 advertisers. South Korea's privacy law provides strict protection for information related to personal beliefs, politic
Amazon and Meta settled separate UK antitrust investigations by agreeing to stop practices that give them an unfair advantage over merchants and customers using their platforms, the watchdog said Friday. The Competition and Markets Authority said it accepted the commitments from the US tech companies to close the investigations into their online marketplaces. The watchdog had been investigating whether Amazon was harming competition and hurting consumers by giving preference to merchants paying for extras like storage, packaging and delivery. It also looked into how Amazon chooses suppliers for the so-called buy box, which shows customers one-click buy now or add to basket options and the collection and use of data. The CMA said Amazon will no longer be able to use data from third-party sellers to give itself an edge. Sellers can negotiate their own delivery rates with independent delivery services and they'll get a fair shot at the buy box, it said. Amazon welcomed the deal, sayi
Country's cyber security agency CERT-In has advised Facebook users to strengthen their account privacy settings after a recent global 'data scraping' incident in the social media platform was detected that affected about 61 lakh Indians. "As the Facebook platform evolves and grows, parts of your account could be public. Data could also be collected and shared in ways you don't know about," the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team or CERT-In said in a public advisory issued on Monday. It is the federal technology arm to combat cyber attacks and guard the Indian cyber space against phishing and hacking assaults and similar online attacks. "It has been reported that globally there has been a large scale leakage of Facebook profile information. The exposed information includes email addresses, profile ID, full name, job occupation, phone numbers and birth date. "According to Facebook, the scraped information does not include financial information, health information or passwords, ..