“The trajectory of privacy and data protection is at a critical juncture, and it is imperative that all stakeholders, including tech giants like yours, uphold their responsibilities to safeguard these rights.
One of the signatories, Pirate Party MEP Patrick Breyer, summarizes Meta’s demand for a “privacy fee” as “economic coercion”.
noyb has subsequently filed another GDPR complaint against Meta’s model, focused on how easy/not is it for people to withdraw consent.
There are also a series of consumer protection complaints in the mix — which argue Meta’s approach breaches EU consumer protection rules.
Completing the circle, consumer right groups have filed as series of GDPR complaints against Meta’s ‘pay or okay’ model, too.
India will lower import taxes on certain electric vehicles for companies committing to invest at least $500 million and setting up a local manufacturing facility within three years, a move that could potentially bolster Tesla’s plans to enter the South Asian market.
Firms meeting these requirements will be allowed to import 8,000 EVs a year at a reduced import duty of 15% on cars costing $35,000 and above.
India currently levies a tax of 70% to 100% on imported cars depending on their value.
The decision could pave the way for Tesla to enter India, as the Elon Musk-led company has been in talks with the government to lower import duties on its electric cars for years.
The move also aligns with India’s goal to boost the adoption of EVs and reduce its dependence on oil imports, with the country setting a target of achieving 30% electric vehicle sales by 2030.
Texas residents can no longer access Pornhub — without a VPN.
As of Thursday, when people in Texas try to access any of the porn sites owned by Aylo, formerly MindGeek, they’ll instead see a long message in opposition to age verification laws.
Laws requiring age verification on adult entertainment sites have already gone into effect in states including Louisiana, Mississippi, Virginia, Utah, Montana and North Carolina.
“Since age verification software requires users to hand over extremely sensitive information, it opens the door for the risk of data breaches,” Pornhub wrote on its blog.
At first, Pornhub complied with age verification via the state-run LA Wallet app, which connects to a Louisiana resident’s ID.
The secondary market allows for that now.”Stripe’s recent secondary sale is a clear example of this.
Leung said that Sapphire deployed roughly $500 million into the secondary market in 2023, and expects to deploy the same if not more into secondary stakes in 2024.
But given the maturation of the secondary market, it doesn’t need to thaw before the market is really ready.
The secondary market “is playing a huge role,” Leung said regarding companies waiting to go public.
[LPs] are not pressuring the GPs to push out their assets, which reduces the demand for the public market.”
Microsoft has revealed that it too will allow business customers to transfer data out of its Azure cloud infrastructure with no so-called “egress fees” attached, following hot on the heels of similar moves by cloud rivals AWS and Google.
The latter of these announced it was ditching egress fees in January, followed by AWS earlier this month.
Similar to rivals including AWS, Microsoft did already allow customers to transfer 100GB of data out of Azure each month for free.
This is notable, because a lot of companies will want to use some Azure services, without having to go all-in on it.
So data transfers from other Azure services, such as the Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN), will still include the standard charges.
Europe eyes LinkedIn’s use of data for ads in another DSA askMicrosoft-owned professional social network, LinkedIn, is the latest to get a formal request for information (RFI) from the EU.
Of specific concern is whether LinkedIn is breaching the DSA’s prohibition on larger platforms’ use of sensitive data for ad targeting.
Profiling based on such data to target ads is banned under the law.
The DSA also empowers the EU to impose fines for incorrect, incomplete, or misleading information in response to an RFI.
LinkedIn isn’t the only platform to be in the EU’s spotlight when it comes to use of data for ads.
Reddit is introducing a new ad format that looks similar to posts made by users on the platform, the company announced on Thursday.
The new ad format, called free-form ads, is designed to feel similar to the content that users share with each other in order to help advertisers get maximum engagement.
Although the new format may be enticing to advertisers, ads that look like regular posts may not be a welcome addition for users.
The company says the new ad format would be a good way to do things like launch a product or introduce a brand to a new audience.
Similar to other ads on Reddit, users will be able to differentiate between free-form ads and regular posts through a “Promoted” label displayed next to the company’s name on a post.
Sharing URLs privatelyNow, if all of this sounds a bit familiar, then that’s likely because you are already familiar with the Safe Browsing Enhanced Mode.
The privacy server removes potential user identifiers and forwards the encrypted hash prefixes to the Safe Browsing server via a TLS connection that mixes requests with many other Chrome users.
The Safe Browsing server decrypts the hash prefixes and matches them against the server-side database, returning full hashes of all unsafe URLs that match one of the hash prefixes sent by Chrome.
This server sits between Chrome and Safe Browsing and strips out any identifying information from the browser request.
Thanks to all of this, Google’s Safe Browsing service should never see your IP address.
The European Union has opened its third formal investigation of a very large platform under the Digital Services Act (DSA), with China’s AliExpress earning itself the dubious honor of being the first online marketplace to face formal probe by the Commission.
Social media platforms X and TikTok are the two other very large online platforms (VLOPs) already under formal DSA investigation (since December and February, respectively).
They said it will also look into transparency and safety concerns related to influencers’ use of AliExpress.
It said it will also investigate how the influencer affiliate program is implemented to verify whether it complies with DSA transparency rules.
There’s no fixed timeline for the EU to conclude a DSA investigation.
Since 2022, Youverify has expanded its real-time business verification coverage to 145 jurisdictions across 48 countries.
Across these countries, Youverify processes 4 million monthly applications for over 3,500 businesses with 800 active clients.
Additionally, the platform’s capacity to verify IDs has expanded from 400 million to 5 billion people — as well as 600 million businesses across various industries such as gaming, travel, healthcare, and telecommunications.
“Individuals and businesses can verify their identity, registration status and ownership using their government data through Youverify.
In addition, we launched our anti-money laundering and risk classification product to address some of these industries,” the CEO noted.
