Web and Technology News
A human rights campaigner, Tanya O’Carroll, has succeeded in forcing social media giant Meta not to use her data for targeted advertising. The agreement is contained in a settlement to an individual challenge she lodged against Meta’s track…
Google has reported the results of an experiment it ran which removed news from search results for 1% of users for 2.5 months in eight* markets in Europe — claiming the results show that news is essentially worthless to Google’s ad business…
Elon Musk-owned social media platform X is suing the Indian government, accusing the country’s IT ministry of unlawfully expanding its powers to remove online content, Reuters reported Thursday. X has long chaffed at government orders to remove o…
OpenAI is facing another privacy complaint in Europe over its viral AI chatbot’s tendency to hallucinate false information — and this one might prove tricky for regulators to ignore. Privacy rights advocacy group Noyb is supporting an indiv…
Google Search and its Play Store app marketplace are suspected of breaching the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), per preliminary findings announced Wednesday by EU Commission enforcers of the bloc’s flagship market contestability…
Google Search and its Play Store app marketplace are suspected of breaching the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), per preliminary findings announced Wednesday by EU Commission enforcers of the bloc’s flagship market contestability…
Being a staggeringly successful big tech company does have some downsides: Apple has lost an appeal against a special abuse control regime that Germany’s competition watchdog applied to it last year. The iPhone maker can expect to continue to fac…
Artificial intelligence continues stirring things up in chemistry. To wit: YC-backed Cambridge, U.K.-based ReactWise is using AI to speed up chemical manufacture — a key step in bringing new drugs to market. Once a promising drug has been identified in…
As duties under the U.K.’s Online Safety Act (OSA) related to tackling illegal content came into force Monday, the internet watchdog, Ofcom, said it has launched a new enforcement program focused on online storage and file-sharing services. The r…
A broad coalition drawn from across the ranks of Europe’s tech industry is calling for “radical action” from European Union lawmakers to shrink reliance on foreign-owned digital infrastructure and services to bolster the bloc’s …
The U.K. government’s secret order to Apple demanding it backdoor the end-to-end encrypted version of its iCloud storage service has now been challenged by two civil rights groups, Liberty and Privacy International, which filed complaints Thursda…
Privacy rights groups have called on Apple’s legal challenge to a secret U.K. government order asking it to backdoor an end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) version of its iCloud storage service to be heard in public, rather than behind closed doors. The …
A U.K. competition authority investigation of Apple and Google’s mobile browsers has concluded that the mobile duopoly’s policies are “holding back innovation” and could also be limiting economic growth. “Mobile browsers a…
Meta is facing an AI copyright lawsuit in France that’s been brought by authors and publishers who are accusing it of economic “parasitism,” Reuters reports. The French litigation was filed in a Paris court this week by the National P…
VC funding into AI tools for healthcare was projected to hit $11 billion last year — a headline figure that speaks to the widespread conviction that artificial intelligence will prove transformative in a critical sector. Many startups applying AI…
Ahead of a May deadline to lock in guidance for providers of general purpose AI (GPAI) models on complying with provisions of the EU AI Act that apply to Big AI, a third draft of the Code of Practice was published on Tuesday. The Code has been in formu…
Reshape Energy is betting on a more integrated approach to accelerate the decarbonization of the built environment. Founded in Munich, Germany back in May 2024, the startup is led by a team with expertise scaling energy businesses, including the German…
Private search engine DuckDuckGo is leaning further into the generative AI opportunity. The non-tracking search engine has been dabbling with expanding the role of AI assistance in its product for the past year, including launching a chatbot-style inte…
The European Union is once again being urged to expand its investigation of Google under the bloc’s Digital Markets Act (DMA). The big aim of the EU’s flagship competition reform — which came into force last spring — was to leve…
Apple is challenging a U.K. Government data access order in the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), the Financial Times reports. The order targeted iCloud backups that are protected by end-to-end encryption. Last month, press leaks revealed the existe…
A U.K. startup, originating from founder Jacob Nathan’s high school science project on using enzymes to break down plastic waste, has secured an oversubscribed $18.3 million in Series A funding. Founded in 2019 in London, Epoch Biodesign now a 30…
We still didn’t get a straight up definition of exactly what an AI agent is during Bret Taylor’s Mobile World Congress fireside chat in Barcelona on Tuesday. The Sierra founder and OpenAI board chair preferred to side-step CNN moderator Ann…
Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch brought a sales pitch to Mobile World Congress on Tuesday, urging delegates at the world’s biggest telecoms confab in Barcelona to invest in building data center infrastructure and “becoming hyperscalers” to …
The drive to decarbonize our economies through electrification and clean energy continues to generate momentum around battery technologies, as storage has a key role to play in enabling the green transition. While renewables are clean sources of energy…
Two sharply different visions of AI were platformed on stage at the Mobile World Congress trade show on Monday. The true believer’s case for the technology’s potential — to merge with and transform human life for the better — was offered up by futurist…