WASHINGTON (AP) — The Internal Revenue Service said Monday it is ending its decades-old policy of making unannounced home and business visits, in an effort to help keep its workers safe and to combat scammers who pose as IRS agents. Effective immediately, revenue agents will no longer make unplanned visits to taxpayers’ homes and businesses […]

LONDON (AP) — London police should not have used counter-terrorism powers to question and detain a French publisher at a train station in April on suspicion he might have been involved in violent protests, a report released Friday concluded. Ernest Moret was on his way to the London Book Fair on April 17 when he […]

NEW YORK (AP) — Meta will face a hefty fine over advertising practices that violate user privacy, Norway’s data protection authority said Monday, unless the Facebook and Instagram owner takes action to comply with the law. Norwegian regulator Datatilsynet says that behavioral advertising — a common marketing model that profiles users by collection information like […]

TORONTO — It knows when you’ve been online shopping, the last time you worked out and whether you’ve been lurking on your ex’s profile. Meta’s new social media platform Threads is gobbling up massive amounts of sensitive data on its 100 million users and counting. The specificity and quantity of information the text and multimedia […]

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has launched an investigation into ChatGPT creator OpenAI and whether the artificial intelligence company violated consumer protection laws by scraping public data and publishing false information through its chatbot. The agency sent OpenAI a 20-page letter requesting detailed information on its AI technology, products, customers, privacy safeguards and data security […]

WASHINGTON (AP) — The chair of the Federal Trade Commission defended her aggressive legal strategy toward the country’s biggest technology companies Thursday as House Republicans charged that the agency has become overzealous and politicized under President Joe Biden. Republicans charged that Lina Khan is “harassing” Twitter since its acquisition by Elon Musk, arbitrarily suing large […]

WASHINGTON (AP) — Three large tax preparation firms sent “extraordinarily sensitive” information on tens of millions of taxpayers to Facebook parent company Meta over the course of at least two years, a group of congressional Democrats reported on Wednesday. They say some of that data was then used by Meta to create targeted advertising to […]

BOSTON (AP) — Medical giant HCA Healthcare, which operates 180 hospitals in the U.S. and Britain, says the personal data of about 11 million patients in 20 states may have been stolen in a data breach. Samples of the data, including addresses, phone numbers, emails and birth dates, were posted to an online forum popular […]

LONDON (AP) — The European Union signed off Monday on a new agreement over the privacy of people’s personal information that gets pinged across the Atlantic, aiming to ease European concerns about electronic spying by American intelligence agencies. The EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework has an adequate level of protection for personal data, the EU’s executive […]

NEW YORK (AP) — Threads, a text-based app built by Meta to rival Twitter, is live. The app, billed as the text version of Meta’s photo-sharing platform Instagram, became available Wednesday night to users in more than 100 countries — including the U.S., Britain, Australia, Canada and Japan. Despite some early glitches, 30 million people […]

TikTok Inc. and a group of five content creators who are suing the state of Montana over its first-in-the-nation law to ban the video sharing app are now asking a federal judge to block implementation of the law while the case moves through the courts and before it takes effect in January. The separate requests […]

LONDON — Meta has unveiled an app called Threads to rival Twitter, targeting users looking for an alternative to the social media platform owned — and frequently changed — by Elon Musk. Threads is billed as a text-based version of Meta’s photo-sharing app Instagram that the company says provides “a new, separate space for real-time […]