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Google is being accused of invading the privacy of students using laptop computers powered by the internet company’s Chrome operating system.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, depicts Google as a two-faced opportunist in a complaint filed in early December with the Federal Trade Commission.
Google disputes the unflattering portrait and says it isn’t doing anything wrong.…Read More
An anonymous message board app that students in some districts are using to tease teachers and fellow students has parents and educators alarmed, not only because of how it is being used, but because the app, Gaggle–Local Message Board, shares a name with Gaggle.Net, a popular safe online teaching and learning solution.
District leaders are urging schools to block the app and are asking parents to be on the lookout for it, due to the negative way students are using it.
Student use of the app at one high school in the Katy Independent School District prompted the school’s principal to block it from the school’s network and send an eMail to parents to alert them to the situation, according to one local news outlet.…Read More
Apple agreed to settle with the Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday after a formal complaint said the company was billing customers for millions of dollars worth of App Store purchases made by children without their parents’ consent, readwrite reports. The initial complaint, filed January 15, alleged Apple was in violation of the FTC Act by not informing parents that once they initially entered their Apple ID username and password combination to purchase an app or an in-app item, their iOS device would approve any further purchases for the next 15 minutes without asking for further authorization…
…Read MoreA school superintendent has been indicted on charges of obstructing justice and tampering with evidence by a grand jury investigating the rape of a 16-year-old girl in Steubenville, Ohio, by two football players, reports the Washington Post. Several other adults were indicted on lesser charges. The state’s attorney general, Mike DeWine, was quoted by the Associated Press as saying: “How do you hold kids accountable if you don’t hold the adults accountable?” The indictments stem from a case earlier this year when two Steubenville High School football players — members of a team that was held in great esteem by the community — were found guilty March 17 of raping a West Virginia girl…
…Read MoreOver the past few months, Facebook has either been the pointed cause for murderous acts of violence being committed, or it has been on the other side, helping criminals be served to justice, The Inquisitr reports. Now Facebook finds themselves in the middle of yet another case. A teen was recently convicted for sending a Facebook friend request. Sounds a little strange, doesn’t it? Before you hesitate on sending another friend request, one should know that the teen had a restraining order prior to his Facebook request. According to Sweden’s The Local, a Swedish teen was arrested after he tried to friend a person that had already filed a restraining order against him. That move is probably a big fat no no at the top of every Facebook social etiquette lists…
A federal judge ruled Wednesday that Apple conspired to raise the prices of eBooks. The eBook publishers at issue — CBS’s Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group, Pearson’s Penguin Group, Macmillan and News Corp.’s HarperCollins — settled and didn’t go to trial. Apple held out, and the U.S. Department of Justice brought a civil antitrust suit against the company in 2012. The DOJ alleged that Apple and the publishers engaged in a “conspiracy” to team up against Amazon and fix the price of eBooks — and Apple was the ringleader of the deal…
…Read MoreGoogle Inc. got a friendly ruling from a federal appeals panel that stripped a group representing authors of class-action status as the search engine defends itself against claims that its plan to create the world’s largest digital library will violate copyrights, the Associated Press reports. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said it was too early for authors to be considered as a group in a lawsuit brought against the Mountain View, Calif.-based company by the Authors Guild. A three-judge panel of the Manhattan court said a judge presiding over the 8-year-old case must consider fair use issues before deciding whether to consider authors as a class…
…Read MoreApple lawyers on Thursday closed their arguments in a federal antitrust trial with fierce warnings that a guilty verdict would sends chills across the internet industry, The Washington Post reports. After three weeks defending Apple against Justice Department charges that it led an e-books price-fixing conspiracy, the company’s attorney said Apple acted legally when it aggressively pursued business deals with publishers. “The government is taking perfectly sensible business agreements to infer sinister conduct,” Apple attorney Orin Snyder of Gibson Dunn said in his closing remarks at U.S. District Court in Manhattan…
…Read MoreThe West Springfield High School student crept up to the car where his buddy was having sex with a teenage girl, a prosecutor said, and shot a cellphone video before laughing and running away, the Washington Post reports. Three boys, ages 16 and 15, were found guilty of felony charges Thursday in juvenile court in Fairfax County, opening a window on the dangers — and potential criminal penalties — when teens mix technology, alcohol and sex. The explicit recording was one of a series the teen and his two best friends from school made of their sexual encounters. They shared them among themselves. In each, the girls testified at a trial Thursday that they did not know they were being taped…
A jury on Wednesday awarded $41.7 million to a woman who sued her prestigious boarding school after contracting a tick-borne illness on a school trip to China that left her unable to speak and brain damaged, the Associated Press reports. The federal jury in Bridgeport ruled in favor of Cara Munn, 20, in her lawsuit against The Hotchkiss School, a private school in Lakeville. The school said it would appeal. Munn, of New York City, was a ninth-grader at Hotchkiss when she joined a school-supervised trip to China during the summer of 2007, according to her lawsuit. The then-15-year-old suffered insect bites that led to tick-borne encephalitis, her attorneys said. The school failed to ensure that the students take any precautions against ticks and allowed them to walk through a densely wooded area known to be a risk area for tick-borne encephalitis and other tick- and insect-transmitted illnesses, her attorneys said…
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