NEW YORK (AP) — Amazon said Wednesday it has closed its $3.9 billion acquisition of the primary care organization One Medical. The e-commerce giant has said the buyout, which was announced in July, is a key component of its growing health care business, which includes its online drugstore Amazon Pharmacy and a patient to doctor […]

SEATTLE (AP) — The public school district in Seattle has filed a novel lawsuit against the tech giants behind TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and Snapchat, seeking to hold them accountable for the mental health crisis among youth. Seattle Public Schools filed the lawsuit Friday in U.S. District Court. The 91-page complaint says the social media […]

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Chinese balloon that traversed the United States before being shot down last weekend captivated public attention and drew sharp denunciations as a brazen spying effort. But if the vehicle for espionage seemed novel, the concept was anything but. In ways that are far less public, but often more worrisome, U.S. officials […]

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — A judge in Kenya has ruled that Facebook’s parent company, Meta, can be sued in the East African country. Meta tried to have the case dropped, arguing that Kenyan courts do not have jurisdiction over their operations, but the labor court judge dismissed that in a ruling on Monday. A former […]

In a first-of-its-kind enforcement, the Federal Trade Commission has imposed a $1.5 million penalty on telehealth and prescription drug discount provider GoodRx Holdings Inc. for sharing users’ personal health data with Facebook, Google and other third parties without their consent. Under a settlement, California-based GoodRx also accepted that it will be prohibited going forward from […]

SEATTLE (AP) — Like the tobacco, oil, gun, opioid and vaping industries before them, the big U.S. social media companies are now facing lawsuits brought by public entities that seek to hold them accountable for a huge societal problem — in their case, the mental health crisis among youth. But the new lawsuits — one […]

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — TikTok will be banned from all Mississippi-issued government devices and the state’s network, Gov. Tate Reeves announced Wednesday in a letter to department and agency heads. The Republican said he issued the directive to safeguard sensitive information from the popular social media app, which is owned by private Chinese company ByteDance […]

Personal emails linked to 235 million Twitter accounts hacked some time ago have been exposed according to Israeli security researcher Alon Gal — making millions vulnerable to having their accounts compromised or identities exposed if they have used the site anonymously to criticize oppressive governments, for instance. Gal, who is the co-founder and chief technology […]

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — Indiana has blocked the Chinese-owned social media app TikTok from state devices, its technology office said Thursday. The Indiana Office of Technology “blocked TikTok from being used in our state system and on our state devices” as of Dec. 7, office spokesman Graig Lubsen told The Journal Gazette. The Office of Technology […]

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Facebook’s corporate parent has agreed to pay $725 million to settle a lawsuit alleging the world’s largest social media platform allowed millions of its users’ personal information to be fed to Cambridge Analytica, a firm that supported Donald Trump’s victorious presidential campaign in 2016. Terms of the settlement reached by Meta […]

JERUSALEM (AP) — Majd Ramlawi was serving coffee in Jerusalem’s Old City when a chilling text message appeared on his phone. “You have been spotted as having participated in acts of violence in the Al-Aqsa Mosque,” it read in Arabic. “We will hold you accountable.” Ramlawi, then 19, was among hundreds of people who civil […]

The maker of the popular Fortnite video game will pay $520 million in penalties and refunds to settle complaints revolving around children’s privacy and its payment methods that tricked players into making unintended purchases, U.S. federal regulators said Monday. The Federal Trade Commission reached the settlements to resolve two cases against Epic Games Inc., which […]