Tech Law

Just when most of the country is on vacation -- including the U.S. Congress -- federal government agencies become active in awarding contracts. The federal fiscal year ends on Sept. 30, and many agencies wait until the last quarter of the year to make acquisitions. The last few months have brought b...

Longstanding concerns about hiring and diversity issues in Silicon Valley recently returned to the fore. The Labor Department recently filed suit against big data firm Palantir, alleging that it had engaged in a pattern of denying jobs to Asian applicants. Race is a greater impediment than gender wh...

Backpage CEO Carl Ferrer is facing extradition to California on charges his company earned millions of dollars by promoting adult and child prostitution through escort advertisements run on the site. Ferrer's arrest took place in Houston upon his return from the Netherlands to the headquarters of hi...

In a bid to help bolster trust in its customer ratings, Amazon on Monday announced that it no longer would allow most incentivized reviews -- that is, reviews written in exchange for receiving products free or at a discount. Such reviews comprise only a small percentage of the tens of millions of re...

Apple last week faced renewed scrutiny for its data-sharing practices, following a report that it retains iMessage metadata and shares it with law enforcement when presented with a court order. The company for months has insisted that it would not share data that would jeopardize the privacy and tr...

Germany's data protection regulator has ordered Facebook to stop collecting and storing data from WhatsApp users in the country. Facebook also must delete any data it already may have harvested from German WhatsApp users, according to Johannes Caspar, Hamburg Commissioner for Data Protection and Fre...

The Consumer Product Safety Commission and Samsung last week announced a formal voluntary recall of about 1 million Galaxy Note7 smartphones, after the high-end flagship device was found to have overheated or caught fire in at least 92 incidents. Samsung was notified of 26 cases of people being burn...

Google Fiber this week began reaching its tentacles into North Carolina's Research Triangle, a move that seems to contradict the gloom-and-doom rumors of layoffs and low consumer interest. The Triangle is Google Fiber's eighth incursion. It's already available in Atlanta; Austin, Texas; Charlotte, N...

The European Union on Tuesday nailed Apple with a $14.5 billion bill for back taxes. "The European Commission has today has adopted a decision that Apple's tax benefits in Ireland are illegal," said EC Competition Chief Margrethe Vestager at a press conference in Brussels. Tax breaks Ireland grant...

HPE and HP are facing a potential class action lawsuit brought earlier this month by four former employees. The companies engaged in widespread age discrimination during a restructuring of the legacy computer and printer manufacturer, according to their complaint. HP from 2012 to 2015 made a series ...

Gawker Media owner Nick Denton on Thursday revealed that Gizmodo, Lifehacker, Kotaku, Jalopnik, Jezebel and Deadspin will continue with their current writers and other staff members following the company's sale to Univision, but that neither he nor Gawker.com will be included in the transition. The ...

A Russian regulatory authority earlier this week named Apple, along with more than a dozen Russian retailers, as a target for an investigation into price-fixing activities. The Federal Antimonopoly Service, or FAS, has seen signs of price-setting coordination among iPhone resellers in Russia, accord...

Gawker founder Nick Denton earlier this week said that he filed for personal bankruptcy protection after exhausting his appeals to stave off collection of damages resulting from a defamation and invasion of privacy lawsuit brought by professional wrestling icon Hulk Hogan. The filing followed a Flor...