CDP Institute

A Florida teen who was able to access private flight data and find Elon Musk’s private plane midair has also exposed serious privacy and safety concerns about aviation flight data availability.

They had planned to require it for all electronic tax filings.

Google announced last week that, in commemoration of Data Privacy Day (Jan 28), it was expanding its differential privacy library to the Python programming language. Differential privacy helps address the problem of encrypting AI training data by adding noise into the data set and making it harder to isolate and extract the original data from the system.

A sobering new report by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) projects long-term cost to businesses upwards of $1 trillion, if the US doesn’t pass a national privacy law. This would, in large part, be due to the need to manage a host of duplicative and nuanced state laws. The ITIF also estimated cost to small business would be tens of billions.

The EU Parliament voted to strengthen the Digital Services Act (DSA) which bans online ads that contain sensitive political, sexual, illegal or misleading content. This along with their Digital Marketing Act (DMA), which sets criteria for identifying and regulating Big Tech “gatekeepers,” is part of an overall effort to reign in abuse.  The law must still be approved by the Council of the EU, which may be more business-friendly.

In the first of what will be a quarterly report, CYTRIO found most business are not compliant with California’s Data Service Access Request (DSAR) requirements. The survey also compared verticals and found education at 8% full compliance and healthcare at 0%.

ISACA, a professional IT training organization, has issued its Privacy Practice 2022 report which shows companies reporting legal/compliance jobs (46%) and IT privacy jobs (55%) are understaffed. Between 60-70% of the companies expect to need more staff in both areas going forward, and say ideal candidates would have knowledge of compliance and legal expertise, and/or hands-on experience in a privacy role and technical experience.

URLgenius, which tracks clicks and app-opens, used the Record App Activity feature that was part of iOS 15.2 to see what network domains 200 apps in 20 app categories were connecting to. They discovered that on average apps were connecting with 15 domains and that 80% of those were to unfamiliar 3rd party domains. This was despite customer preference not to be tracked.

As children in Australia head back to school, the Australian Federation of Police (AFP) issued a reminder that posting pictures with names, information about locations, house photos, and even having kids dressed in their school uniforms can make them vulnerable to predators. Clues to a child’s identity, or about where they live or go to school can be utilized by sex offenders to befriend and gain the trust of children, making them more vulnerable to abduction or abuse.

The latest iOS upgrade has an opt-in feature that warns children if they are sending or receiving an image with nudity. The “communications safety” feature will both blur or diminish an image and will alert the child by way of a banner, though it is not designed to notify parents.

They are also considering alternate technologies.

This is very good since, scarily, 4 out of 5 cars sold last year contained personal data.