The bill signed Wednesday would require them to set up an easy-to-find mechanism that lets Californians opt-out with the push of a button, instead of having to do so repeatedly when visiting individual websites. “These signals are going to be available to millions more people and it's going to be much easier for them to opt out,” said Matt Schwartz, a policy analyst at Consumer Reports.
https://therecord.media/california-signs-law-opt-out-browsers
The defunct analytics company Flurry agreed to pay $3.5 million to resolve a class action lawsuit claiming it improperly harvested data from a widely used period tracking app. Plaintiffs in the lawsuit said data they provided to the app, Flo Health, was obtained by Flurry, the ad analytics company AppsFlyer, Meta and Google.
https://therecord.media/flurry-pays-harvesting-sexual-data
Utah has become the first US state to pass legislation requiring app stores to verify users' ages and seek parental consent before allowing minors to download apps. "Parents want a one-stop shop to verify their child’s age and grant permission for them to download apps in a privacy-preserving way. The app store is the best place for it," Meta, X, and Snapchat said in a joint statement. "We applaud Utah for putting parents in charge with its landmark legislation and urge Congress to follow suit."
https://www.pcmag.com/news/utah-lawmakers-pass-bill-that-puts-app-stores-in-charge-of-age-verification
"Many sites do not respect this indication of a person's privacy preferences, and, in some cases, it can reduce privacy," Mozilla said on the updated DNT support page. It directs users to instead make use of newer Global Privacy Control features also present in the browser.
https://www.theregister.com/2024/12/12/firefox_do_not_track/
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23951353/STK043_VRG_Illo_N_Barclay_3_Meta.jpg)
Meta has acknowledged that all text and photos that adult Facebook and Instagram users have publicly published since 2007 have been fed into its artificial intelligence models.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/12/24242789/meta-training-ai-models-facebook-instagram-photo-post-data
Implementing this bill would require social media companies to verify users’ ages. It would also prohibit platforms from sending notifications related to these feeds between the ages of midnight and 6am without parental consent. Companies that violate the law could face penalties of up to $5,000 per violation.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/06/09/new-york-moves-to-limit-kids-access-to-addictive-feeds/
Canada-based University of Waterloo is racing to remove M&M-branded smart vending machines from campus after outraged students discovered the machines were covertly collecting facial-recognition data without their consent. The scandal started when a student using the alias SquidKid47 posted an image on Reddit showing a campus vending machine error message, "Invenda.Vending.FacialRecognitionApp.exe," displayed after the machine failed to launch a facial recognition application that nobody expected to be part of the process of using a vending machine.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/02/vending-machine-error-reveals-secret-face-image-database-of-college-students/