| Internet Governance House Judiciary Committee Alleges Amazon Lied to Congress About Use of Third-Party Seller Data: In prior testimony, Amazon senior executives said that the company did not use data collected from third-party sellers to compete with them, but multiple reports found that Amazon employees routinely and openly did just that. In a letter to the Department of Justice, the House Judiciary Committee has called on prosecutors to investigate the tech giant for criminal obstruction of Congress. |
| Privacy FTC Says Weight Watchers App Collected Data from Children: WW International, the company formerly known as Weight Watchers, allegedly used an app to collect personal information from children without their parents’ consent in violation of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. The weight loss company will pay a $1.5 million penalty as part of a settlement with the FTC and has agreed to erase the algorithms it developed from the data. |
| Information Security and Cyberthreats Ukraine, Others Faced Cyberattacks up to Two Weeks Before Russian Invasion: Cybersecurity organizations such as Google’s Threat Analysis Group said that they uncovered cyberattacks targeting Ukrainian officials, the Polish military, and U.S. firms that supply natural gas up to two weeks before the Russian invasion of Ukraine began. |
| Intellectual Property LimeWire to Relaunch as NFT Marketplace: Peer-to-peer filesharing site LimeWire will relaunch in May as a marketplace for trading NFTs. LimeWire shut down in 2010 after a federal judge found that it facilitated large-scale copyright infringement. |
| Freedom of Expression and Censorship Russia Blocks Facebook as War in Ukraine Rages On: As many western tech platforms halt their operations in Russia, the Russian government has blocked Facebook from its internet. This came in conjunction with a new law in Russia that makes it a crime to share “fake” information about the invasion of Ukraine. |
| Practice Note Shareholder Lawsuit Against Alphabet Inc. May Proceed: The Supreme Court declined to hear Alphabet’s attempt to throw out a lawsuit by shareholders accusing Google’s parent company of fraudulently concealing a security glitch in the company’s now-defunct social media platform Google+. |
| On the Lighter Side AI Tool Helps Historians Restore Ancient Text: A team of computer scientists and classics experts based in Italy trained an AI tool to restore texts written in ancient Greek, as well as estimate when they were written and from where they may have originated. |
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| Ron Lazebnik Academic Director, Fordham CLIP Tom Norton Executive Director, Fordham CLIP Elyssa Diamond Editorial Fellow |