Sarah Meyer69 posts 0 comments

One year on, the technology to support true data privacy and fully comply with GDPR is still lacking, and regulators have come face to face with the reality that we are still years away from being there.

This year’s Data Privacy Day is especially significant given a tumultuous 2018 with numerous data misuse cases and massive data breaches. A year data privacy came into public consciousness. So what do tech industry leaders have to say about Data Privacy Day 2019?

Phishing attacks known as CEO Fraud or Business Email Compromise are affecting the bottom line of companies and are devastating because the spoof emails have all the appearances of being real, and the victims voluntarily hand over the money.

It’s been a bad year for Facebook – and a worse one for its users. However – many of the problems at the social media company are systemic – and the product of its own attitude to harnessing the data of users to run targeted ad campaigns.

Most people would be rightly excited by the prospect of artificial intelligence automating all facets of our lives. But with machines' increasing ability to mine personal data, collate that data and draw conclusions about behavior, is the sacrifice of privacy and control something people would be willing to give up?

Search engines provide an indispensable service but there is a data privacy tradeoff. The cost is a certain level of intrusion into our lives by gathering data about our online habits and monetizing that data.

Privacy risks inherent in the use of biometric identification are extreme. In the event of a data breach, you cannot reissue an iris or a fingerprint. As technologies become more advanced and surveillance on city streets the norm who will draw the line at just what level of invasive monitoring is permissible?

Increasing Internet surveillance with new set of rules saw Internet authorities in China clenching an iron fist requiring tech companies to identify the real registered names of users and to record user activities.

Marriott has put half a billion guest at risk in one of the largest data breach to date. The scope of the data breach is not only startling due to the numbers of guests that have been affected, it is the sheer amount of time since 2014 that the hackers had had access to the data.

LinkedIn accused of gathering 18 million email addresses of non-users and using those addresses for targeted Facebook advertising. And the Irish Data Protection Commissioner got a bit irate – and rightly so.