Tag Archives: damages

NSO Group Ordered to Pay Meta $167 Million in Damages

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Israeli cybersecurity company NSO Group has been ordered to pay Meta $167 million in damages, concluding a six-year legal dispute after NSO hacked 1,400 WhatsApp accounts belonging to journalists, human rights activists, and government officials.

In December, U.S. District Court Judge Phyllis Hamilton ruled that NSO had breached cybersecurity laws by using the well-known Pegasus spyware to target mobile phones configured with WhatsApp across 20 countries. Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, provides an encrypted messaging platform used by over 2 billion individuals.

In March, Meta sought damages from NSO, and last week the court convened to discuss potential penalties. The ruling was made on Tuesday following two days of deliberation.

“Today’s verdict imposing penalties on NSO is a crucial deterrent for the spyware industry against unlawful activities targeting American companies and users globally. This is a threat to the entire industry, and we must all work to safeguard it.”

WhatsApp announced that it would donate the damages to digital rights organizations dedicated to protecting individuals.

“We are excited to share our commitment to providing a variety of services to our users,” stated Gil Rainer, Vice President of Global Communications at NSO Group. “We firmly believe that our technology plays a vital role in preventing serious crimes and terrorism, and is employed responsibly by authorized government agencies.”

WhatsApp initially filed a lawsuit against NSO in 2019, claiming they had accessed WhatsApp servers without authorization. An NSO executive testified about the company’s capability to install Pegasus software on targeted mobile devices without users’ awareness. This executive asserted that Pegasus assists law enforcement and intelligence agencies in combating crime and securing national safety.

Similarly, Apple sued NSO for device hacking in 2021, though it dropped the case in September. Additionally, in 2021, the Commerce Department blacklisted NSO, stating the firm acted “contrary to U.S. national security or foreign policy interests.”

Spyware, a type of software that infiltrates mobile phones, laptops, and other devices, is increasingly used to surveil unsuspecting victims. Initial spyware from NSO required targets to click on links or images sent via WhatsApp, which would then be unintentionally downloaded on their devices.

Evidence presented during the trial indicated that the latest version can penetrate phones through sent text messages without any action needed from the recipient. The proceedings also revealed that NSO has developed technology capable of infiltrating other messaging applications.

John Scott-Railton, an external expert whose work highlights how NSO Group’s spyware targets individuals through WhatsApp, remarked that Tuesday’s decision would adversely affect the company.

“NSO’s operations rely on compromising American companies,” stated Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at Citizen Lab, a cybersecurity watchdog affiliated with the University of Toronto. “Dictators can exploit this to track dissidents. This ruling conveys a strong message.”

Source: www.nytimes.com

Pilot launches lawsuit against Matt Wallace, X-Influencer for damages to reputation.

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Following a helicopter collision with a Washington passenger jet, 67 people lost their lives in January, waking Joe Ellis up to a flurry of text messages two days later.

Ellis, a transgender helicopter pilot for the Virginia Army National Guard, found herself at the center of a social media frenzy where she was wrongly identified as the pilot involved in the crash. Online mobs tied the incident to diversity initiatives due to Ellis being transgender.

To debunk the false claims, Ellis posted a “Proof of Life” video on Facebook, reassuring everyone of her well-being despite the rumors swirling around her.

“At that moment, my life turned upside down,” Ellis shared in an interview. She recounted how her employer provided armed guards for her family’s protection, and she felt the stigma of being labeled as ‘that transterrorist’ for the rest of her life.

In response to the false allegations, Ellis filed a defamation lawsuit against Matt Wallace, a prominent influencer with millions of followers, for spreading misinformation about her.

After Ellis’s video gained traction online, Wallace deleted the posts related to her and issued an “important update” clarifying that she was not involved in the helicopter collision.

The lawsuit accuses Wallace of launching a damaging and irresponsible campaign against Ellis. Her lawyers have filed the case in the U.S. District Court in Colorado, seeking financial damages from Wallace.

Wallace has yet to respond to requests for comment on the matter.

The legal action against influencers and creators for spreading false information online is gaining momentum as a way to combat misinformation in the digital age.

Ronell Andersen Jones, a law professor at the University of Utah, highlighted the growing trend of honor loss lawsuits, like the one filed by Ellis. These legal actions aim to restore a person’s reputation and combat social falsehoods.

Recent successful honor loss cases against major entities, such as Dominion and Alex Jones, have paved the way for similar action against individuals like Wallace.

Ellis’s lawsuit was supported by the Equality Legal Action Fund, a group of volunteer lawyers advocating for LGBTQ rights.

Challenges such as constitutional hurdles and free speech laws complicate honor loss lawsuits. Proving intentional and malicious intent behind spreading false information is crucial in such cases.

Ellis expressed her intention to donate any financial compensation she receives to the families of the crash victims.

She emphasized the consequences of freedom of speech and the impact it can have, especially when false information incites online mobs. The speculation linking the transgender pilot to the crash emerged as a conspiracy theory shortly after the incident.

Despite the challenges, Ellis remains determined to seek justice and hold those accountable for spreading harmful misinformation online.

Source: www.nytimes.com

UK independent retailers pursue £1 billion in damages from Amazon

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A class action lawsuit has been filed by independent British retailers against Amazon, seeking £1 billion in damages. They claim that Amazon is pushing them out of the online market.

Around 35,000 merchants are part of the lawsuit, led by the British Independent Retailers Association (Bira). They allege that from October 2015 to the present, Amazon used non-public data from retailers to launch its own competing products.

The lawsuit also highlights how Amazon’s “Buy Box” aims to direct shoppers away from independent retailers to its own products, further hurting the market competition.

Bira claims that Amazon already charges a non-negotiable 30% commission on every item sold on the site and has unfairly injected cheaper products into the market, driving many independent UK retailers out of business.

The group plans to submit over 1,150 pages of documents outlining their case against Amazon to the Competition Appeal Tribunal in London.

Amazon has not yet commented on the lawsuit, but has stated in the past that they support over 100,000 small businesses in the UK and that their success is tied to the success of the businesses they work with.

The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority began investigating Amazon in 2022 for potentially giving its own brands and affiliated brands an unfair advantage over third-party sellers, following reports of data misuse.

The investigation concluded with Amazon agreeing to give independent sellers a fair opportunity to be featured in the site’s “buy box” and to refrain from using marketplace data from third-party sellers to gain an unfair competitive edge.

Amazon also made a similar commitment in December 2022, subject to an EU investigation.

Source: www.theguardian.com

Publisher sues Google for antitrust damages from AI-inflicted profit losses

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A new class action lawsuit filed this week in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., on behalf of news publishers, accuses Google and parent company Alphabet of anticompetitive practices that violate U.S. antitrust laws, the Sherman Act, and other laws. The lawsuit, filed by the Arkansas-based publisher Helena World Chronicle, alleges that Google is “siphoning” content, readers and advertising revenue from news publishers through anticompetitive means. It also specifically cites new AI technologies such as Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE) and Bard AI chatbots as exacerbating the problem.

The Helena World Chronicle, which owns and publishes two weekly newspapers in Arkansas, said in its complaint that Google “starves freedom of the press” by sharing publishers’ content on Google and “starves out freedom of the press” and forces publishers to ” They claim that they have lost billions of dollars.

In addition to newer AI technology, the lawsuit also points to Google’s older question-and-answer technologies, such as Knowledge Graph, which was launched in May 2012, as part of the problem.

“When a user searches for information about a topic, Google displays a “knowledge panel” to the right of the search results. “This panel contains a summary of content extracted from the Knowledge Graph database,” the complaint states. “Google compiled this vast database by extracting information from publisher websites (what Google calls ‘material shared on the web’) and ‘open source and license databases.'” There is.

By 2020, the knowledge graph looked like this: grown 500 billion facts about 5 billion entities. However, much of the “collective intelligence” used by Google was content “appropriated from publishers,” the lawsuit alleges.

Other Google technologies, such as “Featured Snippets,” where Google algorithmically extracts answers from web pages, have also been cited as driving traffic away from publishers’ websites.

Perhaps more importantly, the case addresses how AI will impact publishers’ businesses.This issue has recently been clarified in detail In a Thursday report in the Wall St. Journal, It yielded shocking statistics. When the online magazine The Atlantic modeled what would happen if Google integrated AI into search, it found that 75% of the time, the AI ​​would be used by users without requiring them to click through to his website. , and found that the traffic was lost. This could have a big impact on publisher traffic going forward, as Google currently accounts for nearly 40% of publisher traffic, according to SamelWeb data.

Some publishers are now trying to get ahead of this problem. For example, Axel Springer signed a deal with OpenAI this week to license AI model training news. But overall, publishers believe they will lose 20 to 40 percent of their website traffic once Google’s AI products are fully rolled out, the WSJ report said.

The lawsuit reiterates this concern, saying that Google’s recent advances in AI-based search are “for the purpose of discouraging end users from accessing class member websites that are part of the commercial field of digital news and publishing.” It is claimed that it was implemented in

SGE offers web searchers a conversational way to search for information, but it “appropriates” content, ultimately trapping users in Google’s “walled garden”. claims. Publishers also cannot block his SGE, as it uses his web crawler, which is the same as his GoogleBot, Google’s general search service.

Additionally, Google’s Bard AI says it was trained on a dataset that includes “news, magazines, and digital publications,” citing both 2023. report From News Media Alliance Washington Post article on AI training data For reference only. (The Post, working with researchers at the Allen Institute for AI, found that news and media sites were his third largest category of AI training data.)

The lawsuit also points to other concerns, including AdSense price changes and evidence of improper misappropriation of evidence on Google’s part through the destruction of chat messages. This issue is raised in the recent Epic Games lawsuit against Google over app store antitrust issues. I won.

In addition to damages, the lawsuit also seeks an injunction to obtain consent from publishers to use the website’s data to train artificial intelligence products in general, including those of Google itself and its competitors. It also calls on Google to allow publishers who opt out of SGE to continue to appear in Google search results.

Lawsuits continue in the US Google’s agreement with the Canadian government last month The search giant would then pay Canadian media a fee to use their content. Under the terms of the deal, Google will provide US$73.5 million (C$100 million) annually to news organizations in the country, with the funding to be distributed based on news organizations’ headcount. Negotiations with Meta have not yet been resolved, but Meta began blocking news in Canada in August in light of pressure to pay for content under new Canadian legislation.

This lawsuit will be filed at the same time as the U.S. lawsuit. Department of Justice files suit against Google against digital advertising technology monopolies, and the 2020 Department of Justice Civil antitrust lawsuit around search and search advertising (a different market than the digital advertising technology in recent litigation).

The anticompetitive effects of Google’s plans cause serious harm to competition, consumers, workers, and democratic press freedom.” announcement It was posted on the website of Hausfeld, the law firm that handled the case.

“Plaintiff Helena World Chronicle LLC invokes the Sherman Act and the Clayton Act to restore and ensure competition in digital news and reference publishing and install guardrails to preserve the free market of ideas in a new era. Seeks collective monetary and injunctive relief for: Artificial Intelligence.”

Google has been asked for comment, but has not yet received a response.

Complaints are available below.

Helena World Chronicle, LLC v. Google LLC and Alphabet Inc. by tech crunch On Scribd

Source: techcrunch.com