The largest companies across the technology sector were hit by tens of thousands of layoffs in recent months. Unable to maintain major growth experienced during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, many companies look to cut back — and privacy professionals have not been immune. Layoffs.fyi reports tech companies cut a total of 154,843 employees in 2022 and 38,815 thus far in 2023.
The “Balkanisation” of efforts to curb the societal abuses of Big Tech’s surveillance-based advertising is preventing meaningful reforms, Harvard Business School professor emerita Shoshana Zuboff said in an interview with Financial Times. "We have fantastic scholars, researchers, advocates who are focused on privacy, others who are focused on disinformation, others who are focused on the nexus with democracy,” but these disparate parties are not pinpointing the “actual source of harm” for users, she said.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta announced California Consumer Privacy Act noncompliance letters were sent to various mobile application providers as part of a recent investigative sweep. The attorney general's office alerted "popular apps in the retail, travel, and food service industries" to alleged CCPA violations related to user opt-out requests, a lack of clear opt-out mechanisms and failure to process consumer requests submitted via an authorized agent.
The EU and U.S. governments signed an administrative arrangement to facilitate collaborative research on artificial intelligence. The agreement is part the EU-U.S. joint AI roadmap devised during the third EU-U.S. Trade and Technology Council meeting in December 2022. U.S.
According to Husch Blackwell's "Byte Back," the Colorado attorney general's office released the second set of revisions to the Colorado Privacy Act draft regulations. Changes from the last revisions released in January include tweaks to business requirements for privacy notices, universal opt-out mechanisms, and honoring consumer rights and opt-out requests.
Euractiv reports the European Commission held a webinar to prepare national authorities for their role in Digital Services Act implementation. The presentation aimed to help regulators understand classification and threshold for large online platforms to acquaint themselves with provisions for risk management, governance and information sharing. Companies with more than 45 million EU users are categorized as large online platforms and are held to higher standards under the DSA.
In an interview with The Markup, Princeton computer science professor Arvind Narayanan discussed the technology and concerns surrounding artificial intelligence, like the chatbot ChatGPT. Narayanan said ChatGPT is an example of generative AI, and also discusses other categories including automating judgment and those aiming to predict social outcomes.
In an op-ed for The Hill, Consumer Bankers Association Executive Vice President and Head of Regulatory Affairs Dan Smith said the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's implementation of Section 1033 of the Dodd-Frank Act "could have sweeping implications for the financial services marketplace and consumers alike." Smith said the provision intends to ensure consumers can access personal data held by their financial services provider, but will "expose the sensitive financial information of millions of consumers to unnecessary risks and fail to provide them with access required by Congress."
DLA Piper's latest annual General Data Protection Regulation Fines and Data Breach Survey found European supervisory authorities issued 1.64 billion euros in fines since Jan. 28, 2022, a 50% increase over the prior year. Five of the top 10 fines came from Ireland's Data Protection Commission, some targeting behavioral advertising practices. "These have the potential to be every bit as profound for the future of the grand bargain struck between online service providers and consumers as Schrems II has been for international data transfers," U.K.
The U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee is expected to vote in February on legislation to ban TikTok, Reuters reports. Meanwhile, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew agreed to testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee in March, The Wall Street Journal reports.