CDP Institute

Massachusetts’ newly signed Shield Act 2.0 is designed to strengthen a 2022 law by prohibiting business entities operating in the state from disclosing information on legally protected health care services, including reproductive health, abortion, or gender-affirming care. It goes into effect in November.

With less than three months to enforcement mid-December, the Australian government has published findings of a study that determined companies there should be able (with reasonable certainty) to accurately verify age to ensure under-16s can’t access social media. There are of course risks of false positives or false negatives and questions about how companies will comply, given they won’t be told what verification products to use.

The initiative was led by privacy group noyb (None of Your Business).

The US Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, said the UK will not require Apple to provide backdoor access to encrypted data as was mandated earlier this year. Apple had subsequently withdrawn its encryption feature for new users in the U.K and disabled it for users. Apple and the UK have not commented.

The US government plans one big health tracking system launching early next year and incorporating citizen health data culled from…everywhere – the federal government, medical providers, payors, and private sector technology companies. Purportedly, this will expedite care and facilitate processing. Questions abound: 1) Will patients understand privacy implications? 2) What control will they have? How else will the data be used – and who will have access??

Colorado has a new law, Senate Bill 25-276, designed to protect citizen health data privacy regardless of immigration status. It places new prohibitions on collection and disclosure of immigrants’ personal information and establishes significant penalties for violation.

While still denying wrongdoing, Google is prepared to pay $30 million to settle the suit that accused it of collecting kids’ personal data on YouTube without parental consent. It applies to ~35-45 million children in the US under age 13 who used YouTube between July 2013 and April 2020.

Match Group has been fined $14 million after the US Federal Trade Commission found their sites, including Match.com, OkCupid, and PlentyOfFish, were not meeting consumer obligations particularly regarding guarantees, cancellation requests, and honoring ads that touted a free subscription if users didn’t “meet someone special.”