Facebook fined $109,000 for being unclear on how it uses people's data

A German court has fined Facebook 100,000 euros ($109,000) for refusing to follow an order to adequately inform users about how it was using their intellectual property, a consumer group said on Monday.

News of the ruling followed a visit last week by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in which he mounted a charm offensive in the face of increasing antipathy in Germany towards the world's biggest social media network prompted by fears for data protection.

The Berlin regional court ruled that Facebook had not adequately changed the wording of a clause on intellectual property in its terms and conditions after a complaint was filed by the Federation of German Consumer Organisations (VZBV).

"Facebook is persistently trying to evade consumer laws in Germany and Europe," VZBV head Klaus Mueller said in a statement.

"Companies must implement judicial decisions and can't simply sit them out."
A spokeswoman for the Berlin court confirmed the ruling.

A German court originally ruled in March 2012 that Facebook's terms and conditions did not make clear the extent to which users' intellectual property - such as photos and videos - could be used by Facebook and licensed to third parties.

The Berlin court concluded that while Facebook had changed the wording of the clause, the key message remained identical to the previous version.

"We complied with the order to clarify a single provision in our terms concerning an IP license a while ago. The court felt we did not update our terms quickly enough and has issued a fine, which we will pay," a Facebook spokesperson said.

Facebook faces concerns over a perceived cavalier approach to the privacy of users in Germany, a country reunited after the Cold War in 1990 where memories of espionage were stirred anew by Edward Snowden's 2013 revelations of prying by the state.

During his visit last week, Zuckerberg said he had learned from Germany to include migrants as a class of people that needed to be protected from "hate speech" online.

Virtual reality set to transform filmmaking

Chris Milk stepped onto a TED Conference stage and took the audience on an awe-inducing trip into the future of movies. While much of the early attention on virtual reality has focused on use of the immersive technology in video games, Milk and his US startup Vrse are using it to transform storytelling and filmgoing. "We have just started to scratch the surface of the true power of virtual reality," Milk said. "It's not a video game peripheral. It connects humans to other humans in a profound way... I think virtual reality has the potential to actually change the world." He had everyone in the Vancouver audience at TED , which ended Friday, hold Google Cardboard viewers to their eyes for what was billed as the world's collective virtual reality experience. Google Cardboard gear is literally that -- cardboard

Explained: Camera Improvements in the New HTC 10

With the HTC 10, the Taiwanese company is promising to undo the past wrongs in the cameras of its previous flagship phones. The camera has long a weak point in HTC devices. At first, HTC sacrificed image resolution in the M8 and made the size of individual pixels larger to capture more light (what HTC called Ultrapixel). But the resulting 4 megapixel images were often fuzzy, especially when cropped or enlarged. To fix the issue, in its next flagship - the M9 - HTC went with smaller individual pixels in a 20-megapixel camera last year, but it still underperformed in extreme situations, such as indoors and close-ups. In the HTC 10, the company attempts to strike a balance with larger individual pixels (1.55µm), but not as large as before and a 12 megapixel sensor in its camera coupled with a ƒ/1.8 lens. HTC accepts that in the imaging performance in the M9 was not up to the kind of spec of what they really like to see in a flagship. HTC is giving a slight boost to the selfi...

Freedom 251: 30,000 Units Sold, Components for Up to 2.5 Million Will Be Imported

Ringing Bells, the makers of the Rs. 251 smartphone - the Freedom 251 - confirmed to Gadgets 360 on Tuesday that it has still only accepted payments for 30,000 units of the phone. It also added that the components for these phones will be imported, and only assembled in India, not made here. Ringing Bells stopped accepting orders on February 19, and claims to have received over 70 million registrations. The company President and Director both repeatedly stated that the price of the phone would be made possible through economies of scale, and making the phone in India to cut out import costs. Economies of scale? However, in a discussion with Gadgets 360 the company revealed that it had only sold 30,000 units of the phone on day one. The company has now confirmed that it has not sent out the payment emails to anyone else who registered - "we were working out details of cash on delivery, which we are announcing now, so we will be sending emails to the first 2.5...

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