CDP Institute

How many friends do you share your tax return with? Just guessing not a lot – but despite that, US company TurboTax thinks you’ll be happy to share them with the world at large if they ask nicely. And they do – despite the fact your tax return is otherwise privacy-protected by law. What’s the benefit? Revenue for them and other tax services that offer the same, at minimum enabling ad-targeting – and beyond that, just imagine the possibilities of full financial disclosure.

Australian Greens and Coalition groups want amendments to the Digital ID Bill that would put checks on law enforcement access and protect against racial bias. The bill, which includes restrictions for banning of data profiling and collection of data on sexual orientation and race, is designed to add business and personal protections to The Privacy Act.

While transparency is touted as the “best” word for businesses to use to assure customers their privacy is being carefully tended to, customers would do well to look to a business’s privacy policy for the real truth about the relationship. A report from Australia’s Consumer Policy Research Centre and the University of New South Wales shows where the pitfalls are. A key problem for survey participants was they didn’t understand much of the policy terminology often used, including ‘pseudonymised information’ (81%), a ‘hashed email address’ (74%), or an ‘advertising ID’... Read More >

A proposed bill in the Vermont Senate is intended to ban big tech companies from collecting kids’ data and from causing physical or emotional harms. According to Senator Kesha Ram Hinsdale, one of the bill’s co-sponsors, it is sensibly modeled on legislation in the European Union and United Kingdom that has proven successful.

Please provide the following biometrics: 1) audio data, 2) hand/body/eye tracking, 3) metabolic data – calories burned, etc., and 4) support data on your environment – real or imagined.

The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) accused anti-virus software company, Avast of harvesting and selling the data of millions of customers. The company which promised to protect customer data, instead sold it – and now will pay a $16.5 million fine. The data was sold via company subsidiary, Jumpshot, to more than 100 third parties. Exposure included financial and location data as well as health and religious search information.

President Biden is expected to issue an order to prevent data brokers from selling sensitive data on Americans to ‘hostile foreign countries,’ including China, Russia and Iran. The move comes as the US still has not passed federal privacy legislation and concern has grown that advances in AI will make sensitive data, including geolocation, biometric and genomic data easier to analyze and to use for spying or blackmail.

A Colorado Privacy Act amendment to add biometric protections advances to the State Senate. The amendment expands the definition of ‘sensitive data’ to include data about individual biological, genetic and neural properties. This reflects growing concern about new technologies, such as Elon Musk’s Neuralink brain chip implant and evolving technologies from Meta, Apple and others for reading brainwaves.

New York City, with the largest school district in the country, has just announced a lawsuit against the companies that run Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and other major social media sites frequented by kids and teens. The claim is that the sites are “addictive and dangerous” for young people, and costly for the city which spends more than $100 million/year on youth mental health.

Google Gemini has gotten rave reviews as many users like it better than ChatGPT. But a closer look at Google’s privacy policy for Gemini warns not to give it personal information you don’t want shared, since they may keep the data for up to three years, even if you try to delete it. Google workers can also review and annotate the data, and exploratory questions are also saved for AI tool training.