If Americans are to address a rising tide of urban dysfunction and implement high-tech, smart cities, they must focus not only on digital technologies but also on the culture of digital citizenship.

That’s the prescription of Park Jung-sook, secretary-general of the World Smart Sustainable Cities Organization, or WeGO, a global association of over 200 cities worldwide.

“Data is the blood of a smart city and data is generated by smart citizens,” Ms. Park says, “so the social contract is more important than ever.”

Meta has been hit with a record-breaking $1.3 billion fine (€1.2 billion) by EU data regulators, and ordered to stop transferring the Facebook data of EU citizens to the US. EU courts believe such data transfers expose EU citizens to privacy violations — a complaint that stems back to 2013 and revelations by whistleblower Edward Snowden about US mass surveillance programs.

Facebook's owner, Meta, has been fined €1.2bn (£1bn) for mishandling people's data when transferring it between Europe and the United States.

Issued by Ireland's Data Protection Commission (DPC), it is the largest fine imposed under the EU's General Data Protection Regulation privacy law.

GDPR sets out rules companies must follow to transfer user data outside of the EU.

Meta says it will appeal against the "unjustified and unnecessary" ruling.

At the crux of this decision is the use of standard contractual clauses (SCCs) to move European Union data to the US.

Meta has been fined a record $1.3 billion by European Union privacy regulators for transferring personal data from Facebook's EU servers to the United States.

The European Data Protection Board announced the fine on Monday morning, which Meta said it would appeal.

"Fortnite" creator Epic Games will pay $520 million to settle allegations that it illegally collected children's personal information and tricked people into making purchases, the Federal Trade Commission and the company said on Monday.

It will pay a record penalty of $275 million for violating a children's privacy law and adopt strong default privacy settings for young people. Epic Games will also pay $245 million to refund consumers duped by so-called "dark patterns" into making purchases they did not intend to make, the FTC said.

Search giant Google has agreed to a $391.5 million settlement with 40 states to resolve an investigation into how the company tracked users’ locations, state attorneys general announced Monday.

The states’ investigation was sparked by a 2018 Associated Press story, which found that Google continued to track people’s location data even after they opted out of such tracking by disabling a feature the company called “location history.”

Google has agreed to pay $391.5 million in a privacy settlement with 40 state attorneys general over its location tracking practices, according to Oregon's Department of Justice on Monday.

The agreement is the largest consumer privacy settlement by states in US history. States argued that the search giant misled people into thinking they had turned off proximity-based data collection when the company continued to allocate that information. Google agreed to improve its location tracking disclosures starting in 2023.

Alphabet's Google will pay about $400 million to settle a complaint brought by a group of states over allegations the search and advertising giant illegally tracked users' locations, two people familiar with the matter said.

The announcement will come as early as Monday, the sources said.

The lawsuit, which includes Oregon, the people said, is a sign of mounting legal headaches for the tech company from state attorneys general who have aggressively targeted the firm's user tracking practices in recent months.

Alphabet's Google (GOOGL.O) will pay about $400 million to settle a complaint brought by a group of states over allegations the search and advertising giant illegally tracked users' locations, two people familiar with the matter said.

The announcement will come as early as Monday, the sources said.

The lawsuit, which includes Oregon, the people said, is a sign of mounting legal headaches for the tech company from state attorneys general who have aggressively targeted the firm's user tracking practices in recent months.

Last week, the US government warned that hospitals across the US have been targeted by an aggressive ransomware campaign originating from North Korea since 2021.

Ransomware hacks, in which attackers encrypt computer networks and demand payment to make them functional again, have been a growing concern for both the private and public sector since the 90s. But they can be particularly devastating in the healthcare industry, where even minutes of down time can have deadly consequences, and have become ominously frequent.