CDP Institute

The UK children’s charity, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) has found an 82% rise in online grooming against children over the last five years, with 73% coming through Snapchat and Meta. One in four incidents were against primary school children and, where gender was known, 83% of the actions were against girls.

The company joins the ranks of companies trying to find ways to enable individuals to monetize their own data. In this case the company is looking to provide people with the ability to fine-tune which data they share with third parties and to opt-in with companies they trust.

TikTok has retooled to comply with the EU Digital Services Act (DSA), enabling EU users to switch off the personalization algorithm behind its For You videos and Live feeds. Those users who opt out will have access to content but it will not be targeted based on their data. The company is also changing their ad policy for EU users between the ages of 13 and 17 to disallow targeted advertising. Expectations are that this will be in effect before the end-of-August compliance deadline.

When Zoom recently tried to quietly change its Terms of Service to allow use of user data to train AI, without allowing consumers an opt-out, there was swift pushback on social media including a post on X (formerly Twitter) that had more than 2 million views. Now, Zoom has retrenched saying it won’t use video call information to train its AI models or that of third parties. Big Tech is under growing pressure over excesses with AI use, including the recent lawsuit against OpenAI, which was accused of training ChatGPT... Read More >

Illinois has just passed The Civil Liability for Doxing Act, which will go into effect in 2024. It protects Illinois citizens and makes it possible to sue for doxxing (also spelled doxing), which is the unauthorized release of personal information to harm, threaten or embarrass someone. Similar laws exist in Maryland, Nevada, Oregon and Washington, and there is an effort underway to try to get a US federal law. The Illinois law is unusual in that it imposes civil liability on perpetrators, adding a layer of financial accountability others don’t... Read More >

The Scotland’s People genealogy website, which is run by the government, made available adoption records including children’s original and new surnames on records going back more than 100 years. The mother of an adoptee who found her child’s information on the site, described it as every adoptive parent’s worst nightmare. The National Records of Scotland (NRS), which runs the website is exploring measures to safeguard the data, and claims there was no security breach.

Amazon Go and Starbucks Pick Up stores in New York City offer frictionless buying. Walk in, take what you want and go – you pay via a full-skeletal body scan + storewide AI doing mass data captures + a data match to your account. Amazon (now being sued) then shares what they learned with Starbucks.

This according to researchers from the University of California at Berkeley, who found the technology enabled them to pick out a single person from 50,000 others with more than 94% accuracy. Impressive, and quite alarming!

Facebook is being required by the EU to offer its users consent for behavioral ad targeting. The change comes after regulators decided that consent is the only acceptable basis for targeting based on consumer data.  UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) wants to know why Facebook won’t afford the same privacy options to those in the UK and elsewhere.

Scan your eyeball, secure your identity everywhere in one easy step. Too good to be true? Well, WorldCoin, courtesy of Sam Altman, who gave us OpenAI and ChatGPT, may best be approached with caution and some skepticism. While 2 million users have forged ahead to be in his “real human database,” to prove via an eye-scan they are in fact individual people not bots or digital impersonators; an incident in Kenya may give pause. That's because police there confiscated WorldCoin data over concern about the company.