Authorities may need to consider stricter approach to the use of facial recognition technologies as first GDPR fine was issued to a Swedish school.
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.
The principle of programmatic advertising is at the heart of the case filed by Brave since 2018 where practice of real time bidding is alleged to have broken the data protection law.
Amazon announced its facial recognition suite Rekognition is able to read fear as an added emotion. This capability has raised new privacy concerns if implemented by law enforcement agencies.
After years of fighting, Facebook has lost its appeal against the class action lawsuit over the use of facial recognition technology. The company could face billion dollars of penalty if they fail to win the case.
Recent Instagram data scraping by HYP3R has raised many privacy concerns as the trusted Facebook marketing partner was found scraping and re-packaging social media data for advertisers.
Facebook’s lack of strong privacy policies, compliance due diligence and commitment has led to fine after fine. What actions can the social media giant take to salvage their reputation?
Many have raised privacy concerns over FBI’s plan to develop a social media surveillance tool which will proactively identify and reactively monitor persons of interest or suspects in ongoing cases.
Hear what AT&T CPO, Tom Moore, has to say about the company’s privacy policy and how it supports the mission to inspire human progress through the power of communication and entertainment.
New iOS 13 will limit VoIP apps from running in the background and thus close a loophole that allows third-party apps to exploit background access to collect data on users.
Cathay Pacific makes it clear in their new privacy policy that the airline reserves the right to collect data on every single passenger, all in the name of an effort to know as much as they can especially for the high-end VIP passengers.