Slovenia's Personal Data Protection Act is now in force. The law, adopted Dec. 15, 2022, includes "transmission of personal data in the public and private sector," regulation of biometrics, "personal data processing for research, archival and statistical purposes," and more.
Fledge, a Google cookie replacement retargeting solution is gaining supporters after being introduced for testing in the advertising technology industry, Adweek reports.
The U.K. Investigatory Powers Tribunal found MI5 agents “unlawfully retained people's intercepted data,” from 2014-2019, Reuters reports. A presiding judge said the Home Office “failed to make ‘adequate inquiries’" when it approved surveillance warrants from 2016-2019.
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.