185184686
submission
2phar writes:
Meta agreed to pay a maximum $16.68 billion as part of a settlement to resolve claims brought by states across the country that the company designed Facebook and Instagram to addict children, misled consumers about their safety, and improperly collected personal data of children who used its platforms, court papers show.
Meta also agreed to make changes for teenage users of Facebook and Instagram nationwide, including daily usage limits and nighttime blocks, court papers show.
The company denied wrongdoing in agreeing to settle. Shares of Meta rose 4.4% in pre-market trading.
180634032
submission
2phar writes:
The Guardian reports that after months of denials, the Trump administration has acknowledged in a federal court filing that employees working for Elon Musk’s supposed cost-cutting operation accessed and improperly shared Americans’ sensitive social security data.
The justice department court filing, submitted on Friday in an ongoing lawsuit, reveals that a member of the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) signed a secret data-sharing agreement with an unidentified political advocacy group.
“Based on its review of records obtained during or after October 2025,” the filing said, “SSA identified communications, use of data, and other actions by the then-SSA DOGE Team that were potentially outside of SSA policy and/or noncompliant with the District Court’s March 20, 2025, temporary restraining order.”
The court filing added that Doge members shared data with each other using Cloudflare, an unauthorized third-party server, and that the agency had been unable to determine what information was transmitted or whether it still exists on the server. In one instance, a Doge staffer sent an encrypted, password-protected file to Steve Davis, described as a senior adviser to the Doge operation, that the agency believes contained names and addresses of approximately 1,000 people derived from social security systems. Officials have been unable to access the file to confirm its contents.
27251094
submission
2phar writes:
The Irish Government is to publish an order early in the new year to allow music publishers, film producers and other parties to go to court to prevent ISPs from allowing their customers access to 'pirate' websites.
The government has written to music publisher EMI Ireland confirming the order will be published and incorporated into existing legislation in January. EMI Ireland recently warned the Government that it would take legal action against the State if the Government did not address the problem.
12607056
submission
2phar writes:
An ISP must hand over the identity of the operator behind OpenBitTorrent, a court in Sweden ruled yesterday. The ISP must now reveal the identity of its customer, operator of probably the world's largest torrent tracker, to Hollywood movie companies or face a hefty fine.
“OpenBitTorrent is used for file sharing, and we suspect that it is the Pirate Bay tracker with a new name. It is added by default on all of the torrent tracker files on Pirate Bay,” Hollywood lawyer Monique Wadsted said in an earlier comment.
The ruling covers the customer behind the IP addresses 188.126.64.2 and 188.126.64.3 and/or any other IP addresses in Portlane’s entire range (188.126.64.0 – 188.126.95.255) which have been allocated to tracker.openbittorrent.com since August 28, 2009.
2553225
submission
2phar writes:
A federal appeals court ruling late Monday is the cause célèbre of the American Civil Liberties Union, as another provision of the Bush administration's Patriot Act falls to the judicial system.
Until the ruling, recipients of so-called "national security letters" were legally forbidden from speaking out.
