Google Fined | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Google has finally agreed to pay $170 million fine to settle allegations by the Federal Trade Commission and the New York attorney general that its YouTube service earned millions by illegally harvesting personal information from children without their parents' consent. The settlement requires Google to pay $136 million to the FTC and an additional $34 million fine to New York state for allegedly violating the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) Rule. The COPPA rule requires child-directed websites and online services to explicitly obtain parental consent before collecting personal information from children under the age of 13 and then using it for targeted advertising. However, an FTC investigation [ PDF ] against Google's video service for children, called YouTube Kids, revealed that it had illegally gathered kids' data under 13. The data also includes children' persistent identification codes used to track a user's Internet browsing hab...

Google faces a record anti-trust penalty of about 3 BILLION Euros (US$3.4 Billion) from the European Commission in the coming days, according to reports. After 7-years of the investigation, the European Commission filed anti-trust charges against Google last year for violating antitrust laws. The European Union accused the search engine giant that it had abused its dominance in search by unfairly prioritize and displaying its own comparison shopping service at the top of its search results at the expense of rival products. British newspaper The Sunday Telegraph reports that the European Union is currently preparing a fine of about 3 Billion Euros ($3.4 billion), which is almost triple the amount (1.06 Billion Euro) that Intel was levied several year ago over violating antitrust law. According to the newspaper's sources, the EU officials, led by Margrethe Vestager , are planning to openly announce the fine against Google as early as next month, although the exact figure...

Last Saturday millions of France Internet users saw a strange message on Google's Homepage, rather than any GOOGLE DOODLE, as shown above. Despite Paying €150,000 ($228,147)  Fine to France Government, Google has been forced to post a ' Privacy Fine Notice ' on its French Search Engine homepage for violating Data-Processing and Freedoms Laws. The French Data-protection authority - ' The Commission Nationale de l'information et des Liberties ' (CNIL) said on Friday that Google's appeal to suspend the order of January decision has been denied by the Conseil d'Etat i.e. The Administrative Court and the company is ordered to post a notice for 48 hours on its Google.fr page within eight days as of the notification of the decision. In 2012, Google's new privacy policy that combined several separate policies under one umbrella and allowed Google to take advantage of user data from multiple different services at once, was in violation of " fun...