Privacy

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has imposed a $1.5 million penalty on American eyewear manufacturer and retailer Warby Parker due to its failure to properly secure its systems from a credential stuffing attack in 2018 that compromised almost 200,000 individuals' protected health information, reports The Record, a news site by cybersecurity firm Recorded Future.

The group, led by Rep. John Joyce, R-Pa, aims to create a national privacy standard to protect consumer rights and maintain US leadership in digital technology, including artificial intelligence.

Additional details regarding the nature of the incident — which also resulted in the takedown of the firm's MyGenea app for cycle tracking and fertility data viewing — and the types of information that may have been compromised have not been provided.

With the exception of one device owned by a European government official, all of the other impacted phones belonged to business executives from Armenia, Bahrain, Poland, Switzerland, Spain, and the Czech Republic, threatening the potential exposure of confidential corporate and financial details, noted the iVerify report.

"This temporary suspension of the DeepSeek app restricts new app downloads from the app market, and we ask existing users to use it cautiously, such as not entering personal information in the DeepSeek input window (prompt) until the final results are announced," said the PIPC, which committed to bolstering data privacy guidance and compliance checking efforts.

Both Google and Apple have already been sought by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to provide documents submitted by DeepSeek to be published on their respective app stores, as well as their analyses of the AI app.