The developer behind the massively popular online multi-player game League of Legends reduced negative user interactions and received public praise after making simple changes to its chat system. Facing a problem of “toxic” and abusive... +Read more
After being targeted by criticism from its own users, reddit was forced to backtrack from its practice of “ shadowbanning ” users who violated its rules. Users who were shadowbanned received no notice and continued to experience reddit in the same manner as before, but none... +Read more
In mid-2015, the blogging site Medium introduced a straightforward set of content policies for posts and comments. The policies are designed to accommodate controversial speech, well-organized, and written in plain English... +Read more
Coca-Cola was “ slammed by the LGBT community ” after users discovered that the company’s “Share a Coke” social media campaign banned the words “gay” and “homo.” Attempts to create an image of a Coke can with the prohibited words resulted in an... +Read more
Amid a “negative public relations tsunami,” Keurig was forced to roll back a redesign of its coffee-maker that prevented competitors’ coffee pods from being used with the product. Online... +Read more
Katy Perry found herself the subject of press ridicule after her lawyers sent a cease-and-desist letter to a 3D printing service for selling a replica of... +Read more
WordPress won support when it sued on behalf of a student investigative journalist targeted by an illegitimate censorship demand under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). After the student published an investigative article criticizing the... +Read more
Online lawyer-rating website Avvo was credited with a “ landmark ” win protecting “your right to anonymity” after it fought a demand to turn over information about a user who had posted a negative review. When Avvo received the... +Read more
Yelp was cheered after it won a public battle to defend the identities of seven users who had been targeted for their reviews. The... +Read more
In 2006, AOL and its Chief Technical Officer learned the hard way that “anonymizing” data requires more than simply removing user IDs. The company thought that it had properly anonymized the search records of 500,000 of its users when it... +Read more
In August 2011, mobile app maker Broken Thumbs was fined by the FTC and subjected to ongoing monitoring of its privacy practices after collecting information from young users. The FTC alleged that the company’s games collected information from children under 13 by encouraging them to e... +Read more
Microsoft’s Security Development Life Cycle methodology , which includes privacy guidelines for each stage of a product’s development, has evolved from an internal tool to a marketable product. The company credited the tool with a 45 percent decrease in vulnerabilities in its transition from Windows... +Read more