Tag Archive for: fined

Twitter fined $150m for selling users’ data – NationNews Barbados — nationnews.com

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Twitter fined $150m for selling users’ data

Twitter in the United States must pay a $150m fine after law enforcement officials accused it of illegally using users’ data to help sell targeted ads.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Department of Justice say Twitter violated an agreement it had with regulators, court documents showed.

Twitter had vowed to not give personal information like phone numbers and email addresses to advertisers.

Federal investigators say the social media company broke those rules.

Twitter was fined £400 000 in December 2020 for breaking Europe’s GDPR data privacy rules.

The FTC is an independent agency of the US government whose mission is the enforcement of anti-trust law and the promotion of consumer protection.

It accuses Twitter of breaching a 2011 FTC order that explicitly prohibited the company from misrepresenting its privacy and security practices.

Twitter generates most of its revenue from advertising on its platform, which allows users ranging from consumers to celebrities to corporations to post 280-character messages, or tweets.

According to a complaint filed by the Department of Justice on behalf of the FTC, Twitter in 2013 began asking users to provide either a phone number or email address to improve account security.

“As the complaint notes, Twitter obtained data from users on the pretext of harnessing it for security purposes, but then ended up also using the data to target users with ads,” said Lina Khan, who chairs the FTC.

“This practice affected more than 140 million Twitter users, while boosting Twitter’s primary source of revenue.”

Ian Reynolds, managing director of computer security firm Secure Team, told the BBC: “Once again, Twitter is violating the trust that their users have in their platform by using their private information to their own advantage and increasing their own revenue.”

He added: “Twitter led their customers into a false sense of security by acquiring their data through claiming it was for security purposes and protecting their account, but ultimately ended up using the data to target their users with ads.

“This…

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Website operator fined for using Google Fonts “the cloudy way” – Naked Security

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Typefaces can be a tricky business, both technically and legally.

Before word processors, laser printers and digital publishing, printed materials were quite literally “set in metal” (or wood), with typesetters laying out lines and pages by hand, using mirror-image letters cast on metal stalks (or carved into wooden blocks) that could be arranged to create a back-to front image of the final page.

The laid-out page was effectively a giant stamp; when inked up and pressed against a paper sheet, a right-way-round image of the printing surface would be transferred to the page.

Ming Dynasty movable type set with wooden blocks
.Note how the printed page is the mirror of the typesetter’s blocks.

For books printed in Roman script, typesetters kept multiple copies of each letter in separate pigeonholes in a handy tray, or printer’s case, making them easy to find at speed. The capital letters were kept in their own case, which was placed by convention above the case containg the small letters, presumably so that the more commonly-used small letters were closer to hand. Thus capital letters came from the upper case, and small letters from the lower case, with the result that the terms upper case and lower case became metaphorical phrases used to refer to the letters themselves – names that have outlived both printers’ cases and movable type.