Swiss banking secrecy laws began to see significant erosion in 2018, and are facing another substantial blow as the country's government is proposing to allow its spy agency to monitor financial transactions.
Data Privacy
Technological development has always outpaced privacy concerns, but never more so than in the past decade. Collection and centralization of personally identifiable information (PII), tracking of movements and digital surveillance are all at unprecedented levels. Regulations and laws are only just beginning to catch up to the ability of both governments and private entities to deploy these capabilities.
What exactly is there to worry about? The mass collection and centralization of data by giant multinationals such as Facebook and Google is as good of a place to start as any. Two decades of vacuuming up the personal data of users of various online services has created the most impressive marketing capabilities in history, but these profiles have astounding potential for damage when they are used the wrong way or fall into the wrong hands.
Unauthorized information that is captured in data breaches tends to find its way to massive “combo lists” that are sold and traded on the dark web. Social security numbers are added from this breach, home addresses and phone numbers from that one, personal health information from yet another. Soon, a frighteningly complete profile of millions of individuals is available to anyone willing to pay the asking price.
These are just the established data privacy issues. The emerging ones are even worse. High-quality facial recognition technology is just beginning to roll out across the public places of some countries. Artificial intelligence is not only making mass facial recognition possible, but magnifies the power and reach of any application that involves capturing and sorting information: scanning pictures, analyzing speech, sifting through text and location data. This threatens to not only shatter anonymity and privacy, but allow for highly advanced impersonation and take the concept of “identity theft” to new levels.
Some businesses chafe at the trouble and added expense of new and emerging data privacy regulations, but they are vital to both protecting rights and privacy and instilling confidence in end users. Customers want to be able to submit their payment information without worry about data breaches and identity theft, use services without wondering what is being done with their personal information and use devices without fear of surveillance or having location data tracked. The need for meaningful safeguards only grows greater as technological capabilities increase.
Study finds RTB adtech systems share online behavior data 294 billion times per day in the U.S. and 197 billion times per day in Europe. Average internet user in the US is exposed 747 times each day; in Europe it is 376 times per day.
Privacy advocates were upset with the bank data decision, but were also handed a win by the Supreme Court with its ruling that the national government could not go ahead with a plan to collect the biometric data of cell phone users.
India’s new CERT-In order applies to VPN providers, virtual private server (VPS) providers, data centers and cloud service providers. These services are required to hold and turn over a variety of customer data.
If it were to become EU law, the proposal would require that all messaging services scan all of their messages (including encrypted messages) for potential CSAM materials, and includes use of an AI algorithm to evaluate the intent of conversations for signs of child grooming.
A Reuters report indicates that popular cryptocurrency exchange Binance was pressured into handing user data over to the Russian FSB, but the company denies that the story is accurate.
Demand for privacy pros sparked a 30% increase in data privacy jobs in the previous year, with projections that the trend will continue through 2022 and beyond.
Dating app Grindr quietly sold user location data to a third-party ad network from "at least" 2017 until early 2020, making it available to thousands of parties.
While more of a general pledge than any sort of binding terms, the declaration addresses a long-term decline in internet freedom around the world and the concentration of personal data on massive centralized platforms.
FBI defended a nearly threefold increase in FISA warrantless searches by claiming that it was necessary to curtail a wave of foreign threat actors conducting operations against domestic firms.