| Internet Governance DOJ Suit Alleges Uber’s “Wait Time” Fees For Passengers With Disabilities Violate ADA: In the suit, the Department of Justice alleges that the ridesharing company’s practice of subjecting riders who take extra time to enter vehicles to extra fees violates the Americans With Disabilities Act; Uber, which calls the suit “surprising and disappointing,” says that the fees were not intended for riders with valid needs for extra time, and has already “automatically waived” them for riders who self-certify as disabled. Google Loses Appeal In EU Price-Comparison Shopping Antitrust Case: The bloc’s General Court upheld a 2017 decision by the European Commission to fine the company €2.4 billion for prioritizing its own price-comparison shopping service while “relegating the results from competing comparison services . . . by means of ranking algorithms.” |
| Privacy Meta Will Curtail Advertisers’ Ability To Target Ads Based On Sensitive Categories: Beginning in 2022, the company (formerly Facebook) will remove keywords that enable advertisers to perform “Detailed Targeting” of users based on sensitive characteristics such as health, race or ethnicity, political affiliation, religion, and sexual orientation; the change will apply broadly across Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger, as well as Meta’s “audience network.” |
| Information Security and Cyberthreats Stock-Trading App Robinhood Suffers Breach: 7 million customers were reportedly affected by the hack, with 5 million having their email addresses leaked, 2 million having their full names leaked, and just over 300 having their names, dates of birth, and zip codes leaked. |
| Intellectual Property Apple Will Stop Disabling Face ID On Independently Repaired iPhones: In a move that bolsters the right to repair, the company is releasing a software update for the iPhone 13 model that will ensure that Face ID functions after a device’s screen is replaced; prior to the update, the feature would not work if third-party repair shops replaced a phone’s screen without also undertaking a time-consuming and laborious process to replace a microcontroller in the device’s display. |
| Free Expression and Censorship YouTube To Hide Dislikes To Curb Harassment: To prevent abuses including coordinated efforts to increase the number of dislikes on the videos of particular users, YouTube will stop making dislike counts publicly visible and will instead show them only on content creators’ private dashboards. |
| Practice Note UK Supreme Court Denies Class Action Against Google Over Secret Tracking: The court ruled that the £3 billion proposed class action brought on behalf of 4.4 million people, which alleged that Google misused iPhone users’ data by collecting information about their internet usage when they believed they were opted out of tracking, was “unsustainable” in that it alleged only unlawful data processing and did not detail each individual’s resulting suffering of material damage or mental distress. |
| On the Lighter Side Find Your Pet In Art History: As a follow-up to its 2018 Art Selfie feature, which harnessed AI to match your photo with lookalikes in famous paintings, Google has now released Pet Portraits, which compares your pets with animals depicted in artworks around the globe. |
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| Ron Lazebnik Academic Director, Fordham CLIP Tom Norton Executive Director, Fordham CLIP |