The U.S. Department of Justice has secured a $400 million settlement with TikTok and parent company ByteDance in a case related to children’s privacy legislation, the DOJ announced Friday.

“This settlement is a major victory for American children and parents,” Associate Attorney General Stanley E. Woodward Jr. said in a statement. 

“The department’s priority is ensuring that children are protected online and that companies entrusted with their personal information meet their legal obligations. This resolution secures a substantial recovery while reinforcing the protections that families expect and deserve.”

The lawsuit, related to compliance with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, was filed by the Biden administration’s DOJ in 2024.

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The Justice Department said the settlement is one of the largest ever reached in a case involving the privacy act.

Under the terms of the settlement, TikTok and ByteDance will pay $300 million immediately and then $100 million “upon entry of an order vacating a prior consent decree entered against TikTok’s predecessor, Musical.ly.”

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The Justice Department said, since the lawsuit was first filed, “TikTok has undergone significant changes to its ownership, management, compliance functions and privacy practices.

“The company has implemented extensive measures designed to strengthen safeguards for younger users, improve age-related controls and enhance parental oversight,” the DOJ added, saying that those developments have “strengthened protections for millions of American families.”

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The DOJ said the settlement shows its commitment to protecting the public while also acknowledging the progress TikTok has made.

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“The most important result is that children and parents are better protected today than they were when this case began,” Assistant Attorney General Brett A. Shumate of the Justice Department’s Civil Division said in a…

President Donald Trump and top financial regulators hosted key figures in the cryptocurrency and digital assets industries at the White House Wednesday, with a major legislative priority for the administration and those industries nearing the finish line.

Cody Carbone, CEO of The Digital Chamber, attended the meeting and said in an interview with FOX Business the “main takeaway was that the U.S. is not going to slow down in its objective of becoming the crypto capital of the world.”

“There was a lot of talk about the CLARITY Act, this legislation that’s in front of us, and that there was a desire and need to get this done,” Carbone said, noting there is bipartisan support for the bill and that President Trump indicated he hopes to sign it into law in September.

“It was very clear from the president’s comments and from the discussion that the U.S. government and the Trump administration are not going to wait, necessarily, for legislation,” he said. “The SEC and the CFTC have been given the authority from this White House and the mandate to move very quickly.”

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The CLARITY Act would establish legal definitions for digital assets, network tokens, digital commodities and more, while also creating mandates for regulatory agencies, including the SEC and CFTC, to regulate the sector without creating overlapping or contradictory rules.

“The biggest thing that the bill will do is durability. People need to understand that the regulatory framework that is going to be created by the CLARITY Act is not just going to be here for decades and decades to come,” Carbone said, noting it will help builders, issuers and platforms certainty about regulatory compliance.

“It’ll give retail investors, institutional investors more consumer protections, more disclosures,” he said. “When you pass clear rules of the road, like we saw with the GENIUS Act, the market responds immediately. The stablecoin market in the post-GENIUS Act world in the first year almost doubled overnight in the U.S. CLARITY will do that for the rest of the market.”

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The Senate is expected to begin the procedural process of considering the CLARITY Act in mid-September, when the upper chamber is scheduled to be in a three-week session before a lengthy recess in October ahead of the midterm elections in…

The Supreme Court has denied Verizon’s request for rehearing in its fight over a $46.9 million Federal Communications Commission penalty tied to the telecom giant’s former customer location data program.

The justices denied the petition Monday without explanation, leaving the court’s earlier judgment against Verizon in place, according to the court’s Aug. 17 order list.

The denial closes off Verizon’s effort to alter the disposition of a June Supreme Court ruling that upheld the FCC’s forfeiture process against a Seventh Amendment challenge. 

The court found that an FCC penalty order does not automatically force a company to pay. If a company refuses, the government must go to federal court to collect, where the company can fully challenge the case before a judge or jury.

META HEADS TO TRIAL OVER ALLEGED SOCIAL MEDIA ADDICTION, RISKS TO CHILDREN

In that June 4 ruling, the Supreme Court left the lower court’s decision against Verizon in place but sent AT&T’s separate case back to the Fifth Circuit for further review. That difference in how the two cases were resolved became central to Verizon’s rehearing request.

The FCC imposed the nearly $47 million forfeiture in 2024 after finding that Verizon failed to adequately protect customer location information made available through a program involving third-party location service providers.

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Verizon paid the penalty under protest and challenged the FCC’s order in federal court. The Second Circuit rejected the company’s challenge last year, including its argument that the device-location information at issue fell outside the customer-information protections of Section 222 of the Communications Act.

In its rehearing petition, Verizon argued that the FCC’s forfeiture order appeared to impose an immediate obligation to pay within 30 days, while the government later maintained before the Supreme Court that carriers could decline to pay and instead await enforcement action.

The Supreme Court’s June opinion did not decide whether the carriers had been misled into paying or whether a refund could be appropriate. The justices said they expressed no view on the merits of that argument, what relief might be available or in what proceeding.

Verizon then asked the Supreme Court to send the case back to the Second Circuit so the…

Social media giant Meta is heading to court in a case brought by a group of state attorneys general who claim the company designed its social media platforms to be addictive and misled the public about potential risks.

The trial is expected to begin with opening statements on Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in Oakland after the two sides went through the jury selection process last week and Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers turned down Meta’s request for the case to be dismissed. The trial is expected to last four to six weeks, with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg expected to testify.

Attorneys general from California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey first filed the lawsuit in 2023 after a multistate investigation into the impact of Facebook and Instagram on young users. They argue that the platforms were designed to be addictive and that the company downplayed the potential impact on young people, while also alleging Meta violated federal law when it collected personal information from children.

Meta, which is the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has denied wrongdoing and disputes claims that its social media platforms caused the harm alleged by states. It also argues that “social media addiction” isn’t an officially recognized psychiatric diagnosis, which will be a significant point of contention at trial.

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California Attorney General Rob Bonta issued a statement last week after the court allowed the case to proceed, saying, “Meta designed a dangerous product for young users, knew it to be dangerous, and then lied to children, families, and the community about how dangerous it was.”

A Meta spokesperson pushed back on the states’ case against the company and said in a statement to FOX Business that the “limited claims are unsubstantiated and their financial demands are vastly disproportionate.”

“The AGs offer no proof anyone in their states was misled, claim benign features like having an additional Instagram account somehow harmed their residents, and attempt to penalize Meta for industry-wide challenges like age verification. Rather than sticking to the facts or the law, the states have instead decided to chase an outlandish payout,” the company spokesperson said, adding that the company stands by its “record of creating strong protections for teens, and look forward to making our case in court.”

Ticker	Security	Last	Change	Change %
META	META PLATFORMS INC.	568.97	-20.88	-3.54%

Meta has argued that the damages sought by the state attorneys…

Waymo announced Friday that it is expanding its autonomous ride-hailing business across Northern and Southern California, including into two new major markets.

The Alphabet-owned company said it plans to scale up its existing services across the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles while bringing its robotaxi service to Sacramento and San Diego.

The announcement comes after the California Department of Motor Vehicles authorized Waymo to operate in the additional areas last year. On Friday, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) approved the company’s application to expand its autonomous ride-hailing service.

“Big news for the Golden State — we have received the CPUC’s approval to expand our autonomous ride-hailing service across the SF Bay Area and LA, and bring our service to Sacramento and San Diego,” Waymo said in a post on X.

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The company did not provide a timeline for launching service in the new areas but said the expansion would be “gradual and guided by our safety framework.”

Waymo called the regulatory approval an important step in its California expansion.

“This is an important milestone that will allow Waymo to bring the safety and mobility benefits millions of Californians already enjoy to more communities across the state,” the company said in a press release.

The company currently operates thousands of autonomous vehicles across the U.S., including in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix and Austin.

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In February, Waymo announced plans to expand into Chicago as it seeks to establish a foothold in the Midwest.

The company said it had begun “laying the early groundwork” for operations in Chicago, starting with mapping and manual vehicle testing.

Waymo has also faced several recalls this year. Most recently, the company recalled nearly 4,000 robotaxis in June after more than a dozen incidents in which autonomous vehicles entered closed freeway construction zones, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).

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NHTSA said a software issue could allow affected vehicles to enter closed freeway construction zones and continue traveling at posted…

As artificial intelligence use proliferates, Google, which is behind the Gemini AI platform, has announced an effort to examine how its products are being utilized.

Google asserted that “we as a society must work together to positively shape how AI impacts our lives, jobs, and economy. In order for this shared work to be effective, it is critical to have a rich understanding of how AI is being adopted and used in the economy. Society needs empirical insights and evidence-based research to inform decisions, initiatives, and actions.”

The company said that it “is launching the first iteration of the AI & Economy ATLAS (Activity, Task, Landscape and Adoption Study), an ongoing, large-scale, de-identified study of how people are using Google’s AI products and tools.”

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The Big Tech behemoth indicated it is using interactions with its AI for the analysis.

“ATLAS’s first dataset (v1.0) is built from 15 million aggregated and de-identified human-AI interactions across the Gemini App, AI Mode, and the Gemini API, which together are used by more than 1 billion people monthly. ATLAS v1.0 insights span more than 150 countries, 140 languages, 800 occupations, and 4,000 tasks; ATLAS is the most comprehensive look to date at how real people are using AI at scale,” Google noted.

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Part of a lengthy report on the analysis states that “we observe most conversational AI usage happens at home: over 86% of conversations occur outside formal work.

“In the workplace, we show that while AI adoption spans occupations covering just above 88% of U.S. employment, penetration remains shallow and overwhelmingly collaborative in nature, with end-to-end task automation limited in scope.

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“English accounts for only about a third of global conversations, and users do not show signs of systematically abandoning their native languages for complex professional tasks, as work and non-work activities show nearly identical language distributions,” the executive summary of the report notes.

A federal appeals court refused to dismiss thousands of lawsuits against Meta, Google, TikTok and Snapchat, allowing complaints alleging the platforms were designed to be addictive to young users to move forward.

The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected an appeal by Meta and TikTok attempting to overturn a lower court ruling requiring the firms to face more than 3,000 lawsuits filed in federal court, ruling the companies appealed too early.

The social media companies claimed that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 — which generally shields online platforms from being liable for content posted by their users — also prohibits lawsuits on allegations they failed to warn the public about the addictive design of their platforms.

Section 230 has largely protected several companies from lawsuits regarding content posted on their platforms.

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Most appeals come after a case has reached a ruling or a verdict, but the companies claimed that they should not have to wait until the litigation wraps up to challenge the lower court’s rejection of their immunity defense.

However, the court ruled the companies cannot use Section 230 to dismiss lawsuits, saying it can only be used as a liability defense against claims, meaning the appeal was premature.

The statute “merely provides a defense to liability — not immunity from suit,” Judge Jacqueline Nguyen wrote.

The court’s decision clears the way for lawsuits alleging social media companies designed platforms to encourage addictive behavior, failed to verify users’ ages and did not adequately block harmful content.

The panel also denied Meta’s attempt to postpone a trial set to begin on Wednesday in a lawsuit brought by 29 state attorneys general accusing the company of illegally collecting and using children’s data, designing its social media platforms to addict young users and misleading consumers about child safety on the platforms.

The company had claimed that the trial could not move forward while the appeal was pending.

Fox Business reached out to Meta and TikTok for comment.

Attorneys representing thousands of school districts and people suing Meta and other tech firms in federal court, said in a statement the ruling would allow the states’ trial to move forward, as well as a trial over claims brought by school districts set for February.

FOUR STATES SEEKING…

Flock Safety, the embattled AI-powered security camera operator, announced an overhaul to its privacy and security measures Thursday amid growing backlash from consumers and reports of law enforcement abuse. 

As public backlash to the company’s growing network of automated license plate readers (ALPRs) continues to build, the company announced a new set of reforms that includes enhanced privacy protections, strengthening of control for local law enforcement offices and enhanced accountability measures.

To start, Flock is reducing its standard data retention window from 30 days to seven. Previously, all data captured by one of the company’s more than 119,000 cameras nationwide was deleted after the 30-day window. Now, the company announced on Thursday that data will only live on Flock servers for one week.

While law enforcement agencies often respond to privacy-concerned critics by explaining that the Flock system helps them catch criminals, Flock said that 90% of all searches using its product happen within a week anyway, seemingly keeping the privacy reform consistent with law enforcement priorities.

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However, for law enforcement agencies that need more time to investigate, Flock announced the launch of “Evidence Mode,” a feature that will allow agencies to preserve data for longer based on state or local policy. 

Another privacy protection the company announced will be the ability for agencies to decide which types of criminal offenses they want to share data about with other municipalities. 

“For example, City A could allow City B to search its cameras for a stolen vehicle or violent crime while blocking searches related to immigration enforcement,” the company said.

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Flock has come under fire from privacy advocates and concerned citizens, who expressed worry that Flock will be storing data on servers for the long term. 

Some, such as Knox County, Tennessee, Mayor Glen Jacobs have called for a national moratorium on the deployment of Flock’s cameras. 

Civil liberties advocates, such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), have also offered significant criticisms. 

The ACLU said in a Thursday statement that Flock’s reforms “seem to be a thinly veiled PR attempt to counter communities’ genuine privacy concerns with its mass surveillance system with largely hollow security promises, rather than an earnest effort to address them.”

The backlash has been partially fueled by reports of police abusing the technology to stalk romantic…

Tesla is planning to build a massive solar cell factory in Texas that it expects to cost $10.1 billion, according to documents the company filed with the state.

Dubbed Project Crystal Sun, the site would sit just outside Houston in Fort Bend County, according to the documents.

In its pitch to state regulators, Tesla said if Texas rejected the project, it would “miss the opportunity to attract billions of dollars in investment, help create thousands of full-time jobs for its residents and become a hub for domestic solar cell manufacturing in the U.S.”

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“Tesla is currently evaluating the feasibility of constructing its solar cell manufacturing facility at various locations across multiple U.S. states,” the company told the state comptroller’s office.

If built, the facility would create more than 9,700 permanent full-time jobs, as well as 1,147 temporary construction jobs, Tesla said.

Tesla estimated it would owe about $1.1 billion in local property taxes on the project over the next 37 years if it is not granted incentives.

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Tesla plans to break ground on the factory this year and complete construction by 2028, with commercial operations expected to begin in 2029.

Ticker	Security	Last	Change	Change %
TSLA	TESLA INC.	327.05	-5.76	-1.73%
SPCX	SPACE EXPLORATION TECHNOLOGIES CORP.	147.76	+14.47	+10.86%

It’s not clear whether the factory’s solar panels will be produced for installations on the ground or in satellites. 

Tesla CEO Elon Musk also runs SpaceX, which operates thousands of satellites in low-Earth orbit, all of them equipped with solar panels.

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Although Tesla’s filings did not reveal the expected output of the proposed solar factory, Musk has previously outlined a goal of setting up 100 gigawatts of domestic solar production.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration said 100 gigawatts is roughly equal to 8% of the entire country’s power grid capacity.

The White House is monitoring an incident disclosed by OpenAI in which one of the company’s AI models went rogue during testing and hacked the system of an AI infrastructure startup.

The ChatGPT maker said Tuesday one of its AI agents escaped containment during a security test and triggered a hack that compromised the infrastructure of Hugging Face, which operates a platform for developers to collaborate on code for AI models.

The incident demonstrated the expanding capabilities of AI models to go beyond their guardrails and create cybersecurity threats.

Michael Kratsios, who serves as the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and is a science advisor to the president, was briefed on the incident and is monitoring the situation, a White House official told Reuters.

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OpenAI said the incident happened during an internal evaluation designed to measure its AI models’ advanced cyber capabilities.

Researchers disabled some built-in safety safeguards and ran the models in an isolated testing environment with limited internet access.

The company explained that the models exploited an unknown software flaw to access the internet, then breached Hugging Face’s systems in an apparent attempt to cheat on the cybersecurity evaluation it was undergoing.

OPENAI SAYS AI MODEL HACKED ANOTHER COMPANY’S SYSTEMS DURING INTERNAL TEST

OpenAI’s team discovered the anomalous activity internally, while Hugging Face’s security team detected and stopped the activity. Hugging Face had already begun containment and forensic reconstruction with their own models when the OpenAI team connected with them.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Tuesday in a post on X that “we had a significant security incident during evaluation of our models,” adding that the company was sharing what it learned so far and appreciated Hugging Face’s partnership on the issue.

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“We’re grateful for the collaboration with OpenAI on this and other topics,” said Hugging Face co-founder and CEO Clem Delangue. “This incident, possibly the first of its kind,…