Top News: McDonald's sued under BIPA, Google delays Privacy Sandbox, and more

McDonald's being sued under BIPA

McDonald's is being sued by an Illinois customer for recording their biometric data without consent at the company’s new artificially intelligent-powered drive-thru windows. The plaintiff claims that the system violates Illinois' Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) by not asking for approval before using voice-recognition technology for taking the order. Read the full story here.

Google delays Privacy Sandbox till 2023

Google announced that it will delay its Privacy Sandbox initiative, a feature that would block third-party cookies on Google Chrome. The company shared through a blog post that the initiative needed to be delayed since "it's become clear that more time is needed across the ecosystem to get this right". Chrome is now expected to phase out support for third-party cookies by late 2023.

CVS Health exposes over a billion records online

The WebsitePlanet research team, along with Security Researcher Jeremiah Fowler discovered an unsecured and exposed database belonging to CVS Health. The 204GB database was accessible to anyone without any type of authentication and contained 1,148,327,940 records. Read the full report here.

TikTok faces €1.5bn claim in Netherlands

Two Dutch organizations are demanding TikTok to pay around €1,000 in damages to all Dutch children using its platform. As per the report, the total claim amounts to €1.5bn for illegally collecting and trading in the children’s private information.

EDPB publishes final recommendations for personal data transfer

The European Data Protection Board (EDPB) published final recommendations for making transfers of personal data to third countries to comply with EU data protection rules considering the Schrems II ruling. The final recommendations retain the six-step process set forth in the first draft of the recommendations.

Google under EU antitrust investigation

The European Commission has opened a formal antitrust investigation into Google to inspect whether it violated the bloc’s competition rules by unfairly favoring its own online advertising technology over other providers. The investigation will also review if the company is unfairly limiting access to user data to its competitors.

The news comes days after Google and Apple came under similar investigation by Britain’s competition regulator over allegations that the two companies have a harmful duopoly in mobile platforms. Read the complete story here.