Questions tagged [internet]
For questions about the internet. Please ensure a tag for the jurisdiction is also included. This tag should not be used when the question does not crucially hinge on internet usage or involvement.
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Is deciding to use google fonts the sort of decision that makes an entity a controller rather than a processor?
In ensuring GDPR compliance determining which entities are data controllers and which data processors is a critical step. The UK government says:
The UK GDPR defines a controller as:
the natural or ...
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Can I ask a company for money in exchange for info on a bug
Suppose one found information about a large organisations software, for example Apple Pay, about their payment system that could cause very bad legal trouble for them. This could be related to to the ...
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Can you sue a company for false advertisement even if you signed their terms and conditions?
I only have a broad general idea about false advertising so I am not sure if this scenario would be applicable for someone to be sued for false advertising.
If the buyer agreed that upon buying an ...
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What is the current state of U.S. law regarding misleading inducements in shadow banning?
The general idea appears to be that social media companies retain the right to deamplify users' voices, for reasons that may or may not be ethical or sensible. The question is whether users have any ...
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Are social networks legally required to implement user banning/suspension funcionality?
So are social networks that don't allow users to be suspended/banned legal? Or they are required to implement this feature?
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Hotlinking img as profile picture
I have an img on my website which is used as the profile picture of the user.
It is embedded as <img src="${Hotlink}".
The user can specify an URL and that is used as his profile picture.
...
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Use creations made by AI tools
Do we have the right to use an image or text or other generated by Google Bard / Gemini / other known AI tool and put it on our site for example?
or do you have to pay for the tool like microsoft / ...
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Could there be a legal risk in a captcha defeat browser plugin?
Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart, or captcha's, have become more common recently, in particular from cloudflare. If one used or distributed a browser plugin ...
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Does GDPR or ePrivacy apply to localStorage data if they are not transmitted to the server?
Let's say we have a website is plainly static -- no user login, no third-party component, etc. The website uses localStorage for some very local purposes, such as remembering user's theme preference. ...
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Is the BBC website out of compliance with the UK cookie regulations regarding consent and nudging techniques?
The United Kingdom's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) requires websites to make it as easy to reject non-essential cookies as to accept them and also outlaws "nudging techniques", ...
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Texas HB 1181: How does jurisdiction work?
Texas HB 1181 requires commercial sites that serve more than 1/3 of their content as porn to verify users from Texas prior to serving them explicit material or face civil penalties. Can someone please ...
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Is there a legal distinction between “phishing” and “simulated phishing”?
Phishing emails are illegal under laws such as the Anti-Phishing Act of 2005.
Many companies are becoming increasingly aggressive with sending “simulated phishing” emails to their employees. Employees ...
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Is it legal to use random images from the Internet in my personal study notes? [duplicate]
It's the images of objects, the images are helping learn new vocabulary. I don't know if they're under copyright. I mean if I get them from some website.
I want to use them only in my personal notes ...
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2
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How Can This Book Published in 2005 be in the Public Domain?
According to Internet Archive, the Diary of Saint Maria Faustina Kowalska (Divine Mercy in My Soul) published by Marian Press, Stockbridge, MA in 2005, is in the PUBLIC DOMAIN.
St. Faustina died in ...
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What counts as a ‘third party’ in the context of libel?
This post asks about the law jurisdiction of England & Wales.
As I understand it, and I am happy to be corrected on this point, for a written statement to be libellous, it must be published to a ...
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If a user posts illegal content on a service hosted by an entity, who is liable? [duplicate]
Suppose a user posts problematic content on a service hosted by an entity (a hobbyist or a small business). The content is stored in databases provided by the entity. This entity may be storing these ...
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What's to stop domain registrars from price gouging renewals?
Scenario
John Smith launches a social media startup called Turquoise Cow. He buys the Internet domain name "turquoise-cow.com" from GoDaddy. The price is $20 per year.
Years later, Turquoise ...
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2
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Billed as a result of automatic renewal, can I, as a EU citizen, get my money back?
I signed up on a seemingly reputable website for making resumes and was prompted to enter a 7-day paid trial in order to download and use the resume I already made in the web app.
Now, after 7 days, I ...
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Can the federal government prohibit the publication of software it does not like?
There's a bill scheduled to pass the House today that imposes a $5,000 fine every time someone updates TikTok from a web service you provide. (It's not clear to me whether this only applies if you are ...
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Is it legal for internet service providers in the EU to severely and systematically undercut advertised bandwidths?
I have a new mobile data plan with a contractually agreed-upon bandwidth limit of "up to 3 Mbit/s". To my knowledge, the "up to" only accounts for unavoidable reductions in ...
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What are the risks (if any) of not having terms and conditions and a privacy policy on a web app?
I'm making a web app which:
is a personal project,
is open source,
is completely free,
doesn't have any kind of login system (users can't create accounts),
doesn't collect personal user data,
doesn't ...
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112
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Can I use the MIT license as Terms and Conditions on a personal project
I'm making a web app which:
is a personal project,
is open source,
is completely free,
doesn't have any kind of login system (users can't create accounts),
doesn't collect personal user data,
doesn't ...
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1
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Can I be held liable for a client's private file upload? [Bad Question]
I posted a question on Code Review (link below) on whether a webpage that takes a client's file and then displays (mirrors) it back to them (only stored as a temporary file, and only returned to the ...
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Is it permissible for online forums to not delete possibly illegal user content unless ordered by a court?
In the United States, as some related answers point out (like this and this), Section 230 (47 U.S.C. § 230) protects online forum providers from both civil and criminal liability for user content they ...
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1
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247
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Can a school force me to use cloud services I don't agree to?
I am currently studying and my school only allows certain cloud services from a third-party for assignment submissions.
I do not agree to the TOS of such cloud services (cloud storage services) and ...
user54536
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1
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108
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Web scraping legal question
I am based in Germany and have a question regarding web scraping and how this is legal for existing sites.
Two examples:
google.com they have a search engine and scrape the internet. They do not only ...
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1
answer
58
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Is it okay to create an application that stores youtube & spotify links with showing the thumbnails of the content related to the links? [closed]
I am creating an app where users can save the links of the contents they like in the app. The app fetches the thumbnail image of the related content and shows them along with the length of the content ...
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Section 184 of the Canadian Criminal Code and Foreign Actors
This is inspired by recent events, but I will not be naming names.
My understanding of section 184 is that people in Canada are allowed to intercept communications by any means provided that they ...
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1
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192
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When does transmitting something create a copy of it?
If I send a bunch of Internet packets containing the bytes of a copyrighted work to you, privately, is a "copy" of the work being made? And if so, by who?
Say we're talking about a song. ...
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0
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How to prevent legal issues when allowing anonymous users to upload arbitrary content?
A website like https://cloudconvert.com allows any anonymous user to upload arbitrary video/audio/file and convert it to another format. It seems to save the file temporarily for 2 hours before ...
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Is there a specific law protecting undersea cables?
It is in the news that the Yemeni republic are saying the Houthis may target the undersea communication cables that run through the red sea.
Shipping is protected by specific international treaties ...
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Can the criminal records of a person who has died be expunged?
Suppose that someone was murdered in Arizona, but resided in California. Prior to their death, this person had been convicted of misdemeanors and felonies.
Can the executor of this deceased person's ...
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GDPR compliance - Font Awesome
I am building a simple website and therefore wanted to avoid worrying about GDPR compliance by simply not processing or tracking any user data.
However, when investigating my only third-party service &...
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How would one go about a DBA on the internet?
AFAIK a DBA (Doing business as) needs to be for the target market, not for the place of the business. If I'm wrong, that's that.
If I'm correct, then how would one who is selling over the internet to (...
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Workloads on Flux Cloud, who is accountable / responsible for any kind of content hosted on the platform?
I recently stumbled across the https://runonflux.io platform which promises to host decentralized web applications by distributing the workload among many individual locations / distributed nodes.
&...
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how do public vpn service providers avoid being liable for illegal activity of their customers
There are tons of VPN service providers that allow VPN connections for some little amount like 5-15$ per month. Imagine a malicious person using some of these services to hide his cyber-criminal ...
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Does the DMCA takedown procedure apply if the original work is not online?
I am referring to this situation: document B is alleged to infringe the copyright of document A.
Document B is hosted online (as I believe is necessary for the DMCA to apply).
Document A, the original ...
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Is there any case law which prove that two natural person sign a contract on two different day
Is there any case study of a natural two person can be signed a contract on different days
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Would it be possible for someone to modify a form on a website and then claim that they didn't have to agree to the ToS?
Let's say that there's a form on my website that lets the user create a new account. Then let's say that the form has a checkbox labelled "I agree to the Terms of Service" and it is ...
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What is the situation when a computer "agrees" to a contract without the explicit knowledge of a human?
My understanding is that web site terms and conditions are a form of contract. To form a contract a "meeting of minds" must occur in many jurisdictions. There are many situations where a ...
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Web scraping of an online dictionary [closed]
1.I made a web scraper of an online dictionary. It scrapes and saves to a text file definitions and examples of sentences of words in a list. I want to make this scraper publicly available on GitHub. ...
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Can I create a "business website" without registering a business or DBA?
Let's say I want to create a website where customers can order custom chairs. I've got a brand, a name, a logo, etc. Do I have to register the business first before publishing the website?
There's ...
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US: Can a website with a contact form but no privacy policy get sued
I've seen business websites where the founders are literally lawyers, and their websites do not have a privacy policy. Their websites do have a contact form where users enter their email, message, ...
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Who is breaking the law if a child engages in the gig economy?
There is a news story about children working for delivery apps that describes the practice as "illegal". The exact details are not clear, to me at least, so suppose the following ...
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EU law - Ignoring revocation of access rights after completing the task [closed]
I would like to ask you very nicely for advice related to IT security and law. As a freelancer, if I provide a one-off service of programming to modify an information system, I will always ask the ...
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How to get user data from Foursquare/Swarm under GDPR?
Is there a way to download all my contributed check-in and reviews data from Foursquare/Swarm?
The foursquare.com doesn't seem to have a way to log in with the old foursquare/swarm credentials.
Isn't ...
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Does GDPR require consent to collect non-personal information?
If a website never assigns a user a unique identifier, does the website need to get explicit consent from the user before collecting non-personal information?
Examples of non-personal information that ...
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What decentralized services does the Online Safety Bill impose duties upon?
On Tuesday 19 September the Online Safety Bill passed its final Parliamentary debate and is now ready to become law. This is expected to happen imminently.
From wikipedia this law applies to:
Within ...
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Does an official US Government website (e.g. house.gov) prominently posting information known to be false for several weeks violate any US laws?
At about 00:55 in CNN's McCarthy still listed as speaker on House website. Correspondent has theory why in response to the US Government website house.gov still listing Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of ...
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What rules determine jurisdiction on the internet?
It is in the news that Clearview AI has won an appeal against the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO). The reasons for judgment are here: Clearview AI Inc v The Information Commissioner [2023] ...
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