Commentary The drumbeat regarding national security risks posed by TikTok, the popular social media app owned by Chinese big-tech firm ByteDance, has reached a fever pitch. After recently blocking it from federal government devices, Congress might now seek an outright national ban of the app. Given the failure of a prior attempted ban due to…

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Vice Chairman Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) sent a letter (pdf) to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Monday, questioning him about crucial data Meta’s Facebook platform shared with developers in China in recent years. Warner and Rubio alleged, based on past reporting and company documents, that Facebook has known that…

Operators of the messenger app Telegram transferred personal information of its users to the German Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), deviating from the company’s earlier claims of shielding such data from governments. The personal data is related to users who were suspects of terrorism and child abuse crimes, according to Spiegel. In the case of…

BERLIN—Google said on Tuesday that it was taking legal action over an expanded version of Germany’s hate-speech law that recently took effect, saying its provisions violated the right to privacy of its users. The Alphabet unit, which runs video-sharing site YouTube, filed suit at the administrative court in Cologne to challenge a provision that allows…

BERLIN—Austria’s Supreme Court has questioned the legal basis on which Facebook collects user data and referred key issues for a ruling by Europe’s top court, after awarding symbolic damages to activist Max Schrems in his privacy case against the company. In a 34-page ruling, the Austrian court accepted the request from Schrems, who has waged…

Japan’s popular messaging app LINE recently admitted that its users’ personal data stored on its server in Japan could be accessed by China-based engineers that the company had outsourced to. In an official response, LINE admitted that user data had been accessed more than 32 times and that it is now setting up a committee…

A popular fertility app has been sued for allegedly sending personal data to Chinese analytics firms without users’ consent. Premom, a digital ovulation tracker owned by Illinois-based company Easy Healthcare, came under scrutiny last year when a privacy watchdog group found that the app on Android devices was sharing data about the user without permission,…