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Apple Inc's mobile wallet Apple Pay is winning over more U.S. households a year after its launch, but growth has slowed, research released on Monday showed. Fourteen percent of U.S. households with credit cards had signed up for the payment option by the end of September, up from 11 percent in February, Phoenix Marketing International said at a payments conference in Las Vegas. “A very rapid initial threshold was achieved by Apple Pay and it is still growing but the growth rate has slowed down,” said Greg Weed, director of card performance research at Phoenix.

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By Dan Levine SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Uber drivers are entitled to class action status in litigation over whether they are independent contractors or employees, a U.S. judge ruled on Tuesday, in a case that could have wide implications for the sharing economy. Three drivers sued Uber in a federal court in San Francisco, contending they are employees and entitled to reimbursement for expenses, including gas and vehicle maintenance. In the ruling, U.S. District Judge Edward Chen in San Francisco said drivers could sue as a group on the question of whether they are employees or contractors, and over their demand for payment of tips that were not passed on to them.

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(Reuters) – Infidelity website Ashley Madison and its parent company have been sued in federal court in California by a man who claims that the companies failed to adequately protect clients' personal and financial information from theft, saying he suffered emotional distress. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles by a man identified as John Doe, seeks class-action status. The lawsuit accuses Ashley Madison and parent company Avid Life Media Inc, which is based in Toronto, of negligence and invasion of privacy, as well as causing emotional distress.

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By Julia Fioretti BRUSSELS (Reuters) – Google Inc is refusing to bow to an order from the French privacy watchdog to scrub search results worldwide when users invoke their “right to be forgotten” online, it said on Thursday, exposing itself to possible fines. The French data protection authority, the CNIL, in June ordered the search engine group to de-list on request search results appearing under a person's name from all its websites, including Google.com. Google complied with the ruling and has since received more than a quarter of a million removal requests, according to its transparency report.

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A U.S. judge ordered Yahoo Inc to face a nationwide class-action lawsuit accusing it of illegally intercepting the content of emails sent to Yahoo Mail subscribers from non-Yahoo Mail accounts, and using the information to boost advertising revenue. In a decision late Tuesday night, U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose, California said people who sent emails to or received emails from Yahoo Mail subscribers since Oct. 2, 2011 may sue as a group under the federal Stored Communications Act for alleged privacy violations. Holders of non-Yahoo Mail accounts accused Yahoo of copying and then analyzing their emails, including keywords and attachments, with a goal of creating “targeted advertising” for its estimated 275 million Yahoo Mail subscribers, in addition to detecting spam and malware

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By Sarah McBride and Dan Levine SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Silicon Valley powerhouse venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers was cleared on Friday of claims it short-circuited the career of a former partner because she is a woman, in a gender discrimination trial that shook the tech world. A California jury also rejected a claim that Kleiner, the firm that backed Google Inc and Amazon.com Inc, had retaliated against its former partner, Ellen Pao, by firing her after she sued in 2012. Despite days of courtroom drama about affairs, books of erotic poetry and office flirting, juror Steve Sammut, who mostly voted for Kleiner, said the decision came down to Pao's effectiveness at her job. The verdict dashed Pao's hopes for personal vindication, but the trial revealed embarrassing disclosures about how Pao and other women were treated at Kleiner and Silicon Valley's corporate culture and its lack of diversity.

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By Paul Lienert DETROIT (Reuters) – Global automakers are readying a new generation of mass-market electric cars with more than double the driving range of today’s Nissan Leaf, betting that technical breakthroughs by big battery suppliers such as LG Chem Ltd will jump-start demand and pull them abreast of Tesla Motors Inc. At least four major automakers — General Motors Co, Ford Motor Co, Nissan Motor Co Ltd and Volkswagen AG — plan to race Tesla to be first to field affordable electric vehicles that will travel up to 200 miles (322 km) between charges. The new generation of electric cars is expected to be on the market within two to three years.

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Google Inc submitted plans on Friday for a vastly expanded headquarters at the Silicon Valley city where the tech giant is based, presenting a bucolic vision of movable structures to be built under curving and translucent canopies. The submission of the plan to the City Council in Mountain View, California, which the company chose for its headquarters 15 years ago, marks the first step in what city officials describe as a long review process. The new headquarters would give the Internet company the room for an additional 10,000 employees, compared to the 20,000 Google staffers that currently work in the city, a Google spokeswoman said. Google's blueprint for new headquarters in the city's North Bayshore district has gathered widespread attention because the design is seen as architecturally innovative.

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By Noel Randewich and Matthew Miller SAN FRANCISCO/BEIJING (Reuters) – Qualcomm Inc has agreed to pay China a fine of $975 million, the largest in the country's corporate history, ending a 14-month government investigation into anti-competitive practices. The deal also requires Qualcomm to lower its royalty rates on patents used in China, likely helping Chinese smartphone makers like Xiaomi Technology Co Ltd [XTC.UL] and Huawei Technologies Co Ltd [HWT.UL]. It removes a major source of concern among Qualcomm investors, sending shares of the U.S. chipmaker up 1.6 percent to $68.18 in after-hours trading. China's expanding high-speed 4G network is driving demand for smartphones with leading-edge technology, but Qualcomm's opportunities have been clouded by the antitrust investigation, which has also contributed to troubles collecting royalty payments from device makers.

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By Alexei Oreskovic SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Facebook Inc acquired a company that makes voice recognition technology for wearable devices and Internet- connected appliances, the latest sign of its ambition to extend its reach beyond computers and smartphones. Facebook said it acquired wit.ai on Monday, without providing a price for the deal. The 18-month old company, based in Palo Alto, California, makes software that can understand spoken words as well as written text phrased in “natural language. …