In yet another chapter of the ongoing saga of tech giants and their questionable privacy practices, Google finds itself settling a $5 billion privacy lawsuit. This lawsuit revolves around Google’s alleged tracking of users in Chrome (and other browser’s) “incognito” mode, a practice that we’re sure is continuing unabated.

Just today, I stumbled upon a piece of news that’s as intriguing as it is complex. Picture this: The New York Times, a giant in the world of news, is taking on two tech behemoths, OpenAI and Microsoft. Why, you ask? Well, it’s all about copyright infringement, and the plot is thicker than a bowl of oatmeal.

Facebook parent company Meta has responded to a coordinated series of lawsuits (list of states and the complaint below) which include one filed in Federal court on behalf of 33 states and state Attorneys General, and 9 other related suits each filed in individual states in state court.

Cagematch shmagematch; we predict that it won’t be long before Elon Musk sues Mark Zuckerberg and Meta. Musk does appear to be ready to take his beef with Zuckerberg to the courts instead of the street, sending Mark Zuckerberg a cease and desist letter with claims that Meta’s new Threads app, which many have been calling a ‘Twitter killer’, uses Twitter’s intellectual property. Here’s the full text of the letter from Elon Musk (well, his lawyers) to Mark Zuckerberg.

If you’ve heard about the recent Google class action settlement, you may be wondering if it’s real (yes, it’s real), whether you yourself qualify to receive any money from the settlement fund (yes, likely, but you have to register for it), and how much you’ll get (best estimates are somewhere between $7 and $8).

If you received an email saying ‘Notice of Proposed Settlement of Class Action’ for a Facebook lawsuit settlement, it’s legit. There is a settlement in the Facebook lawsuit class action over the Internet tracking of Facebook users, and the settlement payout date will be some time after September 22, 2022. That is because September 22 is the date by which you must submit your claim as part of the ‘class’ and receive your payout. Nobody knows how much the payout will be, and in part that is because it depends on how many people submit claims; the settlement itself is $90million. Of course, the attorneys will receive about a third of that, leaving a pool of about $60million to be divided between everyone who submits a claim (that’s generally how class action settlements work).

Mark Zuckerberg personally encouraged Cambridge Analytica to exploit the data of more than 70million Facebook users. That’s the scathing indictment that Washington D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine leveled at Facebook (now Meta) founder Mark Zuckerberg in a lawsuit filed against Zuckerberg today. Painting a picture of an enormous online empire spanning the globe, “Atop it all is Mark Zuckerberg, the unelected leader of a massive digital empire with billions of inhabitants” says the lawsuit.

The Court has rejected Twitter’s request that they be allowed to share general information about secret government demands (NSLs) for info on their users.

Presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard has filed a lawsuit against Google, citing election interference because Google has suspended her Google ads (Adwords) account. Tulsi also accuses Google of putting her email into the Google and Gmail spam folders at a higher rate than other candidates. Explanation and full text of the lawsuit here.

Facebook has been sued by the Washington D.C. District Attorney for Facebook’s lax and improper handling of Facebook users’ data following last March’s privacy scandal in which Cambridge Analytica was able to harvest and use the personal information of 50 million Facebook users.

California governor Jerry Brown signed a new California net neutrality law into law yesterday (yes, on a Sunday, September 30th), and on that same Sunday, hours later, the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against California’s new net neutrality law, saying that it “unlawfully imposes burdens on the Federal Government’s deregulatory approach to the Internet.”

LifeLock, the company that offers identity theft insurance, has settled a lawsuit with the FTC after the Federal Trade Commission sued LifeLock for deceptive advertising claims. Life Lock says that they were happy to settle the suit because the suit was based on facts that are two years old, and no longer applicable.

In an unusual move, the Court that issued the decision in the AT&T Time Warner antitrust lawsuit yesterday warned the losing party (that would be the U.S. Department of Justice ), essentially, not to bother trying to appeal his ruling. In his 172 page ruling in the case of the United States of America versus ATT Inc, et al, Judge Richard Leon says, among other things, and we quote, “I do not believe that the Government has a likelihood of success on the merits of an appeal.”

What happens to your email after you die? Can the executor of your estate (or the administrator if you die without a will) gain access to your email account and read all of your email? That is the question at the heart of a lawsuit, Ajemian vs. Yahoo, that is heading to the Supreme Court, assuming that the Supreme Court agrees to hear it.

A few years ago we told you about some lawsuits against Mugshots.com and other websites which post the mug shots of those charged with crimes. While the particular lawsuit that we covered, Kaplan and Lashway v. Mugshots, et al, was settled, others were not, and now a Federal judge has ruled that the plaintiffs in a case out of Illinois and Florida against Mugshots.com and UnpublishArrest.com have made a strong enough case for it to move forward, despite the defendants’ motion to dismiss the entire lawsuit for failure to state a claim upon which relief can be granted (known to legal folks as a Rule 12(b)(6) motion).