A federal judge in San Francisco rejected Facebook's request to dismiss a lawsuit filed by Illinois users alleging the social media company “amassed users’ biometric data secretly and without consent.” U.S. District Judge James Donato in his Thursday ruling (in Pacer) also dismissed the company’s request for summary judgment, saying if California law is applied -- which Facebook wanted -- then Illinois' policy protecting its citizens' privacy interests in their biometric data "would be written out of existence." The ruling means the case will proceed under the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act. About a year ago, plaintiffs Carlo Licata, Nimesh Patel and Adam Pezen filed three separate suits, later consolidated and the case transferred to California. The three claim Facebook “automatically enrolled millions of Illinoisans” into its "Tag Suggestions" program, launched in 2010, which uses advanced facial recognition technology to identify people in users' uploaded photographs. Facebook argued the definition of “biometric identifier” and “biometric information” in the Illinois statute excludes photos and information derived from those photos. It said it gets all its biometric data “exclusively” from uploaded photographs. Donato has scheduled a case management conference for June 15. Facebook didn't comment Friday.

Seventy-three percent of surveyed organizations have had at least one data breach or other cyberincident in the past year, CompTIA said Wednesday in a report. About 60 percent of such breaches were categorized as serious, the group said. CompTIA surveyed more than 1,500 business and tech executives from the U.S., Canada and 10 other countries. Ninety-four percent of surveyed organizations from India said they had experienced a breach, while only 39 percent of organizations from Japan self-reported cyberincidents, CompTIA said. Seventy-six percent of all surveyed organizations reported at least one mobile-related security incident, including lost devices and mobile malware. Although 96 percent of organizations indicated testing after cybersecurity training is important, only 23 percent rated their cybersecurity education and training practices as extremely effective, CompTIA said.

The Digital Advertising Alliance's self-regulatory principles "are now in full force" for mobile companies, after compliance decisions involving apps published by Bearbit Studios, Spinrilla and Top Free Games, said the Advertising Self-Regulatory Council (ASRC) in a Wednesday news release. "Consumers can now count on receiving the same real-time notice and choice about interest-based advertising on their mobile devices that they have long enjoyed when browsing the web on their desktops." The Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program reviewed several popular apps and found noncompliance with several such as Spinrilla, which allowed third parties to collect user data for interest-based advertising but didn't provide the required notice and enhanced notice. An inquiry letter was sent to Spinrilla company explaining the compliance gaps with the company's app and website, it said. Compliance is important as mobile is growing in popularity, with ad spending expected to reach 72 percent of all digital advertising in the next few years, it said. "We advise any company grappling with implementation questions in these early days of mobile compliance -- contact us for help, before we contact them with a formal inquiry. Our mission is to build trust between consumers and companies interacting on mobile devices, to the benefit of both," said Genie Barton, Council of Better Business Bureaus vice president and Accountability Program director.

The Donuts domain name registry said it invested in geofence management firm GeoFrenzy, launching its Donuts Labs investment initiative. Donuts didn't disclose how much it invested in GeoFrenzy but said its Donuts Labs initiative will target companies that may create new uses for domain names or otherwise complement Donuts' interests. Apps use the geofence technology that GeoFrenzy manages to define geographic areas and then direct drones, driverless cars and other technologies. “There are outstanding opportunities available to put Donuts' abilities to work in companies that are similar to ours, use DNS [domain name system] technology, or simply are adjacent to our industry,” Donuts CEO Paul Stahura said in a Tuesday news release. “The Donuts team intends to be active in these developing areas.”

Microsoft acquired Solair, an Italian company that has been delivering IoT services to customers “across a number of industries,” including manufacturing and retail, said Sam George, Microsoft partner director for its Azure-branded IoT platform, in a Tuesday blog post. Solair shares Microsoft’s “ambition” for helping customers “harness their untapped data and create new intelligence with IoT,” George said. The acquisition supports Microsoft’s strategy “to deliver the most complete IoT offering for enterprises,” he said. Integrating Solair’s technology into the Azure platform “will continue to enhance our complete IoT offering for the enterprise,” he said. Financial terms weren’t disclosed.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning will be the focus of four public workshops over the next few months, said the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Tuesday. OSTP will be co-hosting the sessions with academic institutions, nonprofits and the National Economic Council. It said information gleaned from the discussions will be used to help develop a public report later this year. Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer Ed Felten wrote in a blog post the meetings will be May 24 in Seattle, June 7 in Washington, June 28 in Pittsburgh and July 7 in New York City. While AI is "confined to narrow, specific tasks," its influence is growing in areas such as education, healthcare, image- and voice-recognition, self-driving cars and drones, wrote Felten. But the technology also carries risks such as eliminating old jobs even as it creates new ones and predicting its behavior in certain scenarios, he said. Issues such as law, privacy, regulation, research and development and security also need to be taken into consideration, said Felten. Plus, he said the National Science and Technology Council's new Subcommittee on Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence will have its inaugural meeting next week. The group, he said, will monitor AI and machine learning advances and technology milestones within the federal government, private sector and internationally and help coordinate federal activity on this issue.

A federal court levied a $13.4 million judgment against computer-financing company BlueHippo and CEO Joseph Rensin to compensate nearly 56,000 consumers who paid for computers but didn't receive them, the FTC said in a Monday news release. U.S. District Judge Paul Crotty in New York ordered Rensin to pay $8 million into a redress fund and the remaining amount at a later time. In 2008, BlueHippo settled an FTC lawsuit that alleged the company didn't deliver personal computers that customers with poor credit ratings had ordered and paid for and also failed to disclose key parts of its refund policy to consumers, the commission said. But the FTC went back to court in 2009, alleging the company "flouted" the terms of that settlement (see 0911130160). After a hearing, the court granted the FTC's contempt motion against the company and Rensin, but entered a judgment of only $609,000, which the commission said it appealed. In his April 19 opinion and order, Crotty rejected Rensin's argument that he was deprived of due process. The Better Business Bureau of Greater Maryland said that BlueHippo filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in 2009. Rensin's LinkedIn profile said he is CEO of private equity firm AGX Funds, but its phone number is disconnected. A message sent through AGX's website for comment wasn't answered.

Despite declining industry sales and rentals of packaged entertainment content, the Redbox kiosk rentals business remains "very large and compelling" and boasts "one of the strongest brands in home entertainment, providing new movie releases and games to millions of consumers,” Erik Prusch, CEO of Redbox parent Outerwall, said on a Thursday earnings call. “We continue to believe that this will be the case for many years to come,” Prusch said.

About two dozen Ultra HD Blu-ray titles were introduced Q1 in the U.S. to support Samsung’s release of the industry’s only Ultra HD Blu-ray player, and consumer demand was “impressive,” the Digital Entertainment Group said in a Friday quarterly report. Consumers bought more than 80,000 Ultra HD Blu-ray discs “in their first weeks of launch,” DEG said. That’s twice the number of discs sold in the comparable period after the Blu-ray launch, it said. Samsung’s Ultra HD Blu-ray players also were “quickly purchased,” but “with only one manufacturer in the market place, the DEG cannot report sales figures,” it said in a footnote. Total U.S. spending on home entertainment content declined 1.8 percent in Q1 to $4.55 billion, DEG said. Sell-through of packaged goods fell 13.2 percent to $1.38 billion, but total spending on digital content delivery jumped 13 percent to $2.48 billion, led by the 19 percent increase in spending on subscription streaming, to $1.41 billion, DEG said.

Operators of Gigats.com settled FTC allegations that the company didn't, as it claimed, prescreen job applicants for hiring employers, but instead was generating consumer leads that were sold to educational and other institutions, the commission said Thursday in a news release. Commissioners voted 3-0 for authorizing staff to file the complaint and proposed court order with U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida. The proposed order imposes a $90.2 million judgment on defendants Expand -- which also does business as Gigats, Education Match and SoftRock -- and Ayman Difrawi, who is also known as Alec Difrawi and Ayman El-Difrawi. But the judgment will be suspended upon payment of $360,000, unless the agency later discovers the defendants misrepresented their financial condition, the FTC said. The commission's complaint said Gigats collected and summarized online job announcements posted by companies, governments and other employers on the website. But the FTC alleged many of those job openings weren't current and employers hadn't authorized Gigats to collect applications or screen or interview applicants, and Gigats "never sent" the collected information to hiring employers. The FTC alleged that Gigats directed job seekers to enroll in education programs, which paid the defendants for consumer leads. Gigats also had "education advisors" who "falsely claimed to be independent" but recommended only schools and programs that agreed to pay the company typically $22 to $125 for each qualified lead. Gigats is barred from misrepresenting itself and from transferring people's personal information to third parties without disclosure and without revealing its relationship with those parties. The company didn't comment.