Taxing your privacy

Joe Apprendi Contributor Joe Apprendi is a general partner at Revel Partners. More posts by this contributor The new era in mobile Big data’s humble beginnings Data collection through mobile tracking is big business and the potential for companies helping governments monetize this data is huge. For consumers, protecting yourself against the who, what and […]

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Perfect timing: Facebook hires top privacy law activists

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It seems like almost everyday there’s a new story about how Facebook betrayed the public trust on a new, unforeseen user privacy issue. Now, Facebook looks to finally reckon with this growing problem by bringing onboard three of the top names in privacy law.

Facebook confirmed on Tuesday that it had hired Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Nate Cardozo, Open Technology Institute attorney Robyn Greene, and Access Now’s Senior Legislative Manager Nathan White. The three new hires are veteran privacy law activists.

BREAKING NEWS: Nate Cardozo, lawyer for @EFF, is joining @Facebook as “Privacy Policy Manager for WhatsApp” — awesome potential future for secure messaging and end-to-end encryption! pic.twitter.com/gkhiBo493Q

— Alec Muffett (@AlecMuffett) January 29, 2019 Read more…

More about Facebook, Privacy, Whatsapp, Privacy Policy, and Tech

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Europe issues a deadline for US’ Privacy Shield compliance

The European Commission has finally given the U.S. a deadline related to the much criticized data transfer mechanism known as the EU-US Privacy Shield . But it’s only asking for the U.S. to nominate a permanent ombudsperson — to handle any EU citizens’ complaints — by February 28, 2019. If a permanent ombudsperson is not […]

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GDPR has cut ad trackers in Europe but helped Google, study suggests

An analysis of the impact of Europe’s new data protection framework, GDPR, on the adtech industry suggests the regulation has reduced the numbers of ad trackers that websites are hooking into EU visitors. But it also implies that Google may have slightly increased its marketshare in the region — indicating the adtech giant could be winning […]

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Europe is drawing fresh battle lines around the ethics of big data

It’s been just over four months since Europe’s tough new privacy framework came into force. You might believe that little of substance has changed for big tech’s data-hungry smooth operators since then — beyond firing out a wave of privacy policy update spam, and putting up a fresh cluster of consent pop-ups that are just […]

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AI spots legal problems with tech T&Cs in GDPR research project

Technology is the proverbial double-edged sword. And an experimental European research project is ensuring this axiom cuts very close to the industry’s bone indeed by applying machine learning technology to critically sift big tech’s privacy policies — to see whether AI can automatically identify violations of data protection law. The still-in-training privacy policy and contract […]

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Unroll.me to close to EU users saying it can’t comply with GDPR

Put on your best unsurprised face: Unroll.me, a company that has, for years, used the premise of ‘free’ but not very useful ’email management’ services to gain access to people’s email inboxes in order to data-mine the contents for competitive intelligence — and controversially flog the gleaned commercial insights to the likes of Uber — […]

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Facebook did not inform the FTC about initial Cambridge Analytica leak

In testimony before the Senate Judiciary and Commerce, Science, and Transportation committees, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said that his company did not notify the Federal Trade Commission about the initial user data leak that triggered its most recent privacy scandal. “They considered it a ‘closed case’,”Zuckerberg said in response to a question over whether […]

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Grindr hit with privacy complaint in Europe over sharing user data

The Norwegian Consumer Council has filed a privacy complaint about Grindr, arguing it’s in breach of national and European data protection laws after it emerged the dating app has been sharing personal information about its users with third parties. As we reported earlier, Norwegian research outfit SINTEF analyzed the app’s traffic and found that — if set — […]

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