As gadgets and services get smarter, they need more data, and face the hard problem of keeping it safe. Data privacy has become a huge problem for Google, Facebook, Amazon, and any company using artificial intelligence to power its services — and a major sticking point for lawmakers looking to regulate. Here’s all the news on data privacy and how it’s changing tech.
404 Media has a good story about the reported hack of Gravy Analytics, and let’s just say the situation doesn’t seem great:
The hackers said they have stolen a massive amount of data, including customer lists, information on the broader industry, and even location data harvested from smartphones which show peoples’ precise movements, and they are threatening to publish the data publicly.
The European Commission must pay a German citizen EU 400 (about $412 USD) for improperly safeguarding the person’s data sent to Meta in the US after they used a “Sign in with Facebook” button to log into an EU site, reports Reuters.
The Intercept asked over 30 firms whether they’d use their data to help the Trump administration deport immigrants, but it only got four responses — and none of them were from Meta, Google, Microsoft, or Apple.
The president-elect announced that Tom Homan — one of the architects of Trump’s family separation policy — will play a major role in his administration.
In 2022, Homan spoke at a conference organized by white supremacist Nick Fuentes. Starting next year, he’ll “be in charge of all Deportation of Illegal Aliens,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
He asked the Commerce Department to strengthen rules designed to prevent repressive regimes from using US-made surveillance technology to spy on dissidents, journalists, and Americans.
The proposed export controls will make it harder for regimes to engage in human rights abuses ranging from mass surveillance of their citizens to hacking into the phones of dissidents and independent journalists. However, I am concerned that the draft rules contain gaps that would allow autocratic governments to continue buying technologies and services from American companies to commit human rights abuses.
An IT consultant, Nunzio Samuele Calamucci, allegedly breached Italy’s Interior Ministry databases on behalf of Equalize, a private investigations company run by a former Italian police officer.
Equalize used a computer virus to break into government databases, prosecutors claim.
In wiretaps, Calamucci, who worked for Equalize, allegedly boasted of having hacked the information of 800,000 people.
Several Italian politicians were among those who were hacked. And agents with Mossad, Israel’s spy agency, allegedly tried to buy information from Equalize.
The ruling was made by the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) following a complaint filed in 2018 that said LinkedIn’s tracking ads business violated GDPR.
DPC Deputy Commissioner Graham Doyle commented:
“The lawfulness of processing is a fundamental aspect of data protection law and the processing of personal data without an appropriate legal basis is a clear and serious violation of a data subjects’ fundamental right to data protection.”
While it might be fun to interact with Character.AI’s user-created chatbots, a report from Wired shows the challenges of taking down chatbots that impersonate people without their consent, including a teen who was murdered in 2006:
Given that Character.AI can sometimes take a week to investigate and remove a persona that violates the platform’s terms, a bot can still operate for long enough to upset someone whose likeness is being used. But it might not be enough for a person to claim real “harm” from a legal perspective, experts say.
State Attorney General Ken Paxton alleges that TikTok has violated the Securing Children Online through Parental Empowerment Act by not giving parents control of their kids’ privacy and account settings, writes Reuters. TikTok denied the allegations in a statement to The Texas Tribune.
TikTok A federal judge blocked part of the act requiring large social networks to stop harmful content from reaching minors just prior to the law taking effect on September 1st.
In a blog post, Mozilla president Mark Surman writes about the organization’s plans to fix the “fundamentally broken” online advertising industry:
We have the beginnings of a theory on what fixing it might look like — a mix of different business practices, technology, products, and public policy engagements. And we have started to do work on all of these fronts.
You can read Mozilla’s full plan in the post linked below.
