Privacy Laws

Union minister Ashwini Vaishnaw on Wednesday said there is a need to make existing laws more stringent to curb vulgar content on social media platforms. In the Lok Sabha, the Information and Broadcasting Minister said the Parliamentary Standing Committee should take up the issue and also called for a consensus to frame more strict laws in this regard. Earlier, there were editorial checks and it was decided whether something was right or wrong but those checks have ended. Today, social media is a platform for freedom of press but it is uncontrolled and there is vulgar content, the minister said during the Question Hour. There is a need to make existing laws more stringent laws to curb vulgar content on social media platforms, Vaishnaw said amid din in the House. He was responding to questions by BJP member Arun Govil about existing mechanisms to check telecast of vulgar and sex-related content through social media platforms illegally and whether the government proposes to make the .

The agency has accused Meta of misleading parents about protections for children

Italian regulators said they told OpenAI that its ChatGPT artificial intelligence chatbot has violated European Union's stringent data privacy rules. The country's data protection authority, known as Garante, said on Monday that it notified San Francisco-based OpenAI of breaches of the EU rules, known as General Data Protection Regulation. The watchdog started investigating ChatGPT last year, when it temporarily banned within Italy the chatbot that can produce text, images and sound in response to users' questions. Based on the results of its fact-finding activity," the watchdog said it concluded that the available evidence pointed to the existence of breaches of the provisions in the EU privacy rules. OpenAI has 30 days to reply to the allegations. It didn't respond immediately to a request for comment. The company said last year that it fulfilled a raft of conditions that the Garante demanded to get the ChatGPT ban lifted. The watchdog had imposed the ban after finding that some

Google has agreed to settle a USD 5 billion privacy lawsuit alleging that it spied on people who used the "incognito" mode in its Chrome browser along with similar "private" modes in other browsers to track their internet use. The class-action lawsuit filed in 2020 said Google misled users into believing that it wouldn't track their internet activities while using incognito mode. It argued that Google's advertising technologies and other techniques continued to catalog details of users' site visits and activities despite their use of supposedly private browsing. Plaintiffs also charged that Google's activities yielded an unaccountable trove of information about users who thought they'd taken steps to protect their privacy. The settlement, reached Thursday, must still be approved by a federal judge. Terms weren't disclosed, but the suit originally sought USD 5 billion on behalf of users; lawyers for the plaintiffs said they expect to present the court with a final settlement ...

The Centre on Wednesday told the Supreme Court that a committee is being constituted and guidelines will be framed regarding the seizure of electronic devices such as phones and laptops by investigating agencies. The apex court had on November 7 asked the Centre to put in place guidelines on the seizure of electronic devices of individuals, particularly media professionals, and had termed it a serious matter. "In this matter, I was to come back with guidelines. The committee is being set up and we will come out with guidelines," Additional Solicitor General (ASG) S V Raju, appearing for the Centre, told a bench of Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul and Justice Sudhanshu Dhulia. Raju requested the bench to grant him some time. The top court was hearing two petitions, including one filed by 'Foundation For Media Professionals', seeking comprehensive guidelines for the search and seizure of digital devices by investigating agencies. During the hearing, senior advocate Nitya Ramakrishnan, ...

Amazon is rolling out an independent cloud for Europe as it looks to address strict regulations that companies and those in the public sector face in the European Union. Amazon Web Services said on Wednesday that its AWS European Sovereign Cloud, which will be located in and operate out of Europe, will have the same security, availability, and performance as existing AWS regions but will be separate from them. The cloud will let customers keep all metadata they create in the European Union and will have its own billing and usage metering systems. The AWS European Sovereign Cloud reinforces our commitment to offering AWS customers the most advanced set of sovereignty controls, privacy safeguards, and security features available in the cloud, Max Peterson, vice president of Sovereign Cloud at AWS, said in a written statement. Transatlantic data protection has been a growing concern since the European Union's top court struck down a data sharing agreement in 2020 known as Privacy ...

Search giant Google has agreed to a USD 93 million settlement with the state of California on Thursday over the its location-privacy practices. The settlement follows a USD 391.5 million settlement with 40 states, reached in November 2022, to resolve an investigation into how the company tracked users' locations. The states' investigation was sparked by a 2018 Associated Press story, which found that Google continued to track people's location data even after they opted out of such tracking by disabling a feature the company called location history. Our investigation revealed that Google was telling its users one thing that it would no longer track their location once they opted out but doing the opposite and continuing to track its users' movements for its own commercial gain. That's unacceptable, and we're holding Google accountable with today's settlement, said Attorney General Rob Bonta in a statement. Representatives for Google parent company Alphabet Inc. did not immediatel

The tech giant has also been ordered to stop transferring data collected from Facebook users in Europe to the United States of America

The fines seek to rectify wrongs committed, and caution firms that privacy breaches will not be taken lightly and non-compliance would incur the authorities' ire

The DPC, which acts as the EU's lead privacy regulator for Meta, said WhatsApp must reassess how it uses personal data for service improvements

Irish regulators on Wednesday hit Facebook parent Meta with hundreds of millions in fines for online privacy violations and banned the company from forcing European users to agree to personalised ads based on their online activity. Ireland's Data Protection Commission imposed two fines totalling 390 million euros (USD 414 million) in its decision in two cases that could shake up Meta's business model targeting users with ads based on what they do online. The watchdog fined Meta 210 million euros for violations of the European Union's strict data privacy rules involving Facebook and an additional 180 million euros for breaches involving Instagram. It's the commission's latest punishment for Meta for data privacy infringements, following four other fines for the company since 2021 that total more than 900 million euros. The decision stems from complaints filed in May 2018 when the 27-nation EU's privacy rules, known as the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, took ...

PCR needs to be backed and governed by a comprehensive Public Credit Registry Act in consultation with the govt, and it must follow the latest privacy guidelines based on a laid-down consent framework

India has defended stricter regulations citing the need to safeguard users' interests in a country that has more than 760 million internet users

New legislation should clearly define nature of datasets, respondents say

Apple CEO Tim Cook wrote a letter to US lawmakers voicing his support for a recent bipartisan effort to draft a comprehensive federal privacy law

Most respondents say Bill must provide for independent Data Protection Authority like GDPR. Current form allows for excessive govt intervention and it is unlikely DPA will function independently

India needs an effective privacy law quickly

Businesses get help when local legislation aligns with standards set in European Union's General Data Protection Regulation, says the senior Gartner executive.

Opening up access to geospatial data is a welcome step

The Data Protection Authority took action following a complaint by the Norwegian Consumer Council alleging personal data was shared unlawfully for marketing purposes