CDP Institute

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.

In a turn-around from last year, India’s Lower House of Parliament, the Lok Sabha, may now pass the Digital Personal Data Protection Bill. Ostensible purpose is to protect citizen privacy rights, though significant concerns are being raised about aspects of the legislation. The Editors Guild of India (EGI), for example, believes it may give the government power to censor and curtail press rights.

Apple is instituting new rules that will require app developers to explain why they need certain data, or if not justified, to stop collecting it. This is in response to developers using Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to extract and exchange data via device signals, aka “fingerprinting,” which Apple doesn’t allow. The new requirement will go into effect this fall, and then in the spring apps and updates that don’t provide sufficient reasons will be rejected.

The Irish Protection Commission, which has jurisdiction over TikTok in the EU, has a month to issue the final penalty and rules for the platform when it comes to children’s and teen data. TikTok is used by 125 million people in the EU bloc. While the fine amount has not been announced, this can move ahead because the European Protection Board (EDPB) resolved disputes among several of the EU regulators.

The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) introduced regulation to keep children off the internet a lot of the time, which could be a game changer for Tencent, ByteDance and other social platforms. The new rules have specific rules for different age groups of children, and include limiting “non-adult” children from accessing the internet via mobile for more than 2 hours between the hours of 10 p.m. and 6 am.

The EU regulators want more concessions if Meta wants to stave off a major fine.