Your daily round-up of some of the other stories in the news
A lawyerbot will help you sue Equifax
As the fall-out from the Equifax hack lumbers on, minds are inevitably turning to lawsuits. And there’s a bot to help you do that, potentially avoiding the need to hire a costly lawyer.
DoNotPay, a bot originally developed by British-born entrepreneur Josh Browder as a side project to help him handle his own parking tickets, was launched when he was 18, and has since helped fight some 375,000 parking tickets in the UK and the United States.
Browder, a student at Stanford University, has also adapted the bot to help asylum-seekers with immigration applications.
The bot helps you fill out the forms to sue in small claims courts, though as The Verge points out, you’ll still have to serve the forms yourself.
Lawyer Scott Nelson from Public Citizen told The Verge: “I am not inclined to think it would be a panacea. Filing and winning a small claims case takes more than just filling in a form.”
Facebook hit with privacy fine
Facebook has been fined €1.2m by Spanish regulators for privacy violations, Reuters reported on Tuesday.
The AEPD, Spain’s privacy regulators, said that the social media giant hadn’t gained adequate user consent for how it collects, stores and uses data for advertising, and found two serious infringements and one very serious infringement, imposing three fines, of €600,000 for the very serious breach, and two of €300,000 for the two lesser infringements.
The AEPD said that Facebook had kept information for more than 17 months after users had closed their accounts, and also said that “the social network uses specifically protected data for advertising, among other purposes, without obtaining users’ express consent as data protection law demands – a serious infringement”.
Gang of 10 arrested over Aadhaar breach
Aadhaar, India’s “Orwellian” digital ID scheme, suffered another breach when criminals managed to bypass what’s claimed to be “robust” security to issue more than 8m counterfeit ID cards, Indian media reported on Monday.
NDTV said that Uttar Pradesh police had arrested a gang of 10 men, recovering fingerprint scanners, laptops, rubber stamps, Aadhaar cards, GPS devices and printing materials.
The Uttar Pradesh Special Task Force said that the gang had used cloned fingerprints to carry out fake enrolments on the Aadhaar website, and added that security practices at the UIDAI, the Unique Identification Authority of India, had been repeatedly broken.
Aadhaar cards are required for access to a wide range of services in India, and there has been a great deal of concern about both the over-reach and the security of the scheme.
Catch up with all of today’s stories on Naked Security
Wilbur
You have a spurious comma in “two of €3,00,000 for the two lesser infringements.” That looks a lot like €3,000,000 when reading quickly.
Paul Ducklin
Fixed, thanks.
Roy
600,000 x 3 + 300,000 x 2 is 2,100,000 by my calculation not 1.2Mn
Mark Stockley
“two serious infringements and one very serious infringement, imposing three fines, of €600,000 for the very serious breach, and two of €300,000 for the two lesser infringements”
600,000 x 1 + ( 300,000 x 2 )