Tag: Google

• Tuesday, January 22nd 2019 - 09:59 UTC

  French data regulator fines Google 50 million Euros for “lack of transparency”

  

  Google has been fined 50 million Euros by the French data regulator CNIL, for a breach of the EU's data protection rules. CNIL said it had levied the record fine for “lack of transparency, inadequate information and lack of valid consent regarding ads personalisation”.

• Wednesday, November 28th 2018 - 09:20 UTC

  Google staff protest Dragonfly, a project with China that helps state surveillance

  

  Staff at Google have called on the search giant to end work on a controversial search engine project for China. Called Dragonfly, the search engine would be a censored version developed with the aid of the Chinese government. In a letter published online 60 employees said the project would only help state surveillance.

• Wednesday, October 17th 2018 - 09:04 UTC

  Global streaming shock: over an hour outage of YouTube

  

  YouTube, the second most visited website in the world, had experienced an outage across its various platforms on Tuesday night for more than an hour. The Google-owned streaming site took to Twitter to thank users for “your reports about YouTube, YouTube TV and YouTube Music access issues.”

• Tuesday, October 9th 2018 - 08:40 UTC

  Google + in another exposure breach affecting some 500.000 users

  

  Google is shutting down much of its social network, Google+, after user data was left exposed. It said a bug in its software meant information that people believed was private had been accessible by third parties. Google said up to 500,000 users had been affected.

• Wednesday, September 19th 2018 - 08:59 UTC

  Apple pays €14.3bn to the Irish treasury, an EU tax Dublin does not want to collect

  

  Apple has paid the Irish government €14.3bn (£12.7bn), money that the European Commission ruled the tech giant owed due to illegal tax breaks. Ireland's Finance ministry said the payment was a “significant milestone”, although Dublin insists Apple was not given any special tax treatment. In 2016 the Commission ruled the below 1% effective tax rate the firm paid in Ireland amounted to illegal state aid.

• Thursday, August 23rd 2018 - 09:02 UTC

  Labour leader Corbyn to propose tax on tech giants to pay for public interest journalism

  

  A windfall tax could be levied on tech giants such as Google, Amazon and Facebook to pay for public interest journalism, Jeremy Corbyn is expected to announce. The Labour leader will call for radical reform of the media landscape in a speech at the Edinburgh TV Festival.

• Friday, August 17th 2018 - 12:33 UTC

  Google employees protest plans for a “censored search engine” in China

  

  Hundreds of Google employees have written to the company to protest against plans to launch a “censored search engine” in China. They said the project raised “urgent moral and ethical questions” and urged the firm to be more transparent.

• Thursday, July 19th 2018 - 04:37 UTC

  Google fined 2.42bn Euros by the European Commission for abuse of power

  

  Google has been fined 2.42bn Euros by the European Commission after it ruled the company had abused its power by promoting its own shopping comparison service at the top of search results. The amount is the regulator's largest penalty to date against a company accused of distorting the market.

• Wednesday, July 4th 2018 - 08:35 UTC

  Google reportedly allowed apps to scan G-mail messages

  

  Google has confirmed that private emails sent and received by Gmail users can sometimes be read by third-party app developers, not just machines. People who have connected third-party apps to their accounts may have unwittingly given human staff permission to read their messages.

• Friday, June 29th 2018 - 09:02 UTC

  Facebook, Google and Microsoft act in an “unethical” way on privacy issues, claims Norwegian regulator

  

  Facebook, Google and Microsoft push users away from privacy-friendly options on their services in an “unethical” way, according to a report by the Norwegian Consumer Council. It studied the privacy settings of the firms and found a series of “dark patterns”, including intrusive default settings and misleading wording.