TORONTO — Tim Hortons is launching a credit card that can be used through its mobile app, the latest move into an increasingly competitive rewards space. Tims Financial is a new division of Tim Hortons that will offer a no-annual-fee Mastercard powered by Neo Financial, the company said in a press release Wednesday. The card […]

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Microsoft will pay a fine of $20 million to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that it illegally collected and retained the data of children who signed up to use its Xbox video game console. The agency charged that Microsoft gathered the data without notifying parents or obtaining their consent, and that […]

LONDON (AP) — Critics accuse the British administration of running “government by WhatsApp” because of the popularity of the messaging app with politicians and officials. So it feels inevitable that a tussle over WhatsApp messages is at the heart of Britain’s official inquiry into how the country handled the COVID-19 pandemic. Thousands of messages exchanged […]

WASHINGTON (AP) — Amazon agreed Wednesday to pay a $25 million civil penalty to settle Federal Trade Commission allegations it violated a child privacy law and deceived parents by keeping for years kids’ voice and location data recorded by its popular Alexa voice assistant. Separately, the company agreed to pay $5.8 million in customer refunds […]

A meeting headed by party leader and President Xi Jinping on Tuesday urged “dedicated efforts to safeguard political security and improve the security governance of internet data and artificial intelligence,” the official Xinhua News Agency said. Xi, who is China’s head of state, commander of the military and chair of the party’s National Security Commission, […]

WASHINGTON (AP) — Amazon will pay more than $30 million to settle alleged privacy violations involving its voice assistant Alexa and its doorbell camera Ring. The Federal Trade Commission voted to file charges in two separate cases Wednesday that could also force the company to delete certain data collected by its popular internet-connected devices. In […]

MONTREAL — Artificial intelligence pioneer Yoshua Bengio says regulation in Canada is on the right path, but progress is far too sluggish. Speaking in Montreal, the Universite de Montreal professor said he backed a bill tabled in the House of Commons last June that adopts a more general, principles-based approach to AI guardrails and leaves […]

HELENA, Mont. (AP) — Social media company TikTok Inc. filed a lawsuit Monday seeking to overturn Montana’s first-in-the-nation ban on the video sharing app, arguing the law is an unconstitutional violation of free speech rights and is based on “unfounded speculation” that the Chinese government could access users’ data. The lawsuit by TikTok, owned by […]

LONDON (AP) — The European Union slapped Meta with a record $1.3 billion privacy fine Monday and ordered it to stop transferring users’ personal information across the Atlantic by October, the latest salvo in a decadelong case sparked by U.S. cybersnooping fears. The penalty of 1.2 billion euros is the biggest since the EU’s strict […]

LONDON (AP) — The European Union slapped Meta with a record $1.3 billion privacy fine Monday and ordered it to stop transferring user data across the Atlantic by October, the latest salvo in a decadelong case sparked by U.S. cybersnooping fears. The penalty fine of 1.2 billion euros from Ireland’s Data Protection Commission is the […]

TORONTO — Anna Pobletts has spent the last few years on a mission to make passwords a thing of the past, but passkeys — the technology that could replace them — have never truly been on the brink of widespread consumer adoption until this year. “We’re seeing some really big-name sites like EBay, Best Buy […]

ChatGPT is now a smartphone app, which could be good news for people who like to use the artificial intelligence chatbot and bad news for all the clone apps that have tried to profit off the technology. The free app became available on iPhones and iPads in the U.S. on Thursday and will later be […]