CDP Institute

Way back in 2015, the discovery of Cambridge Analytica’s data breach that exposed the data of ~87 million Facebook users was shocking and was a story we didn’t know would be the harbinger of many to come. But while Meta may have hoped to have exorcised this Facebook ghost, a shareholder’s class action accusing the company of misuse of user data while it knew that Cambridge Analytica violated its privacy policies has just been revived by a U.S. appeals court.

It’s official in Germany, beginning May 2025, citizens who want official ID documents (and really, who doesn’t?), must submit a biometric standards-approved photo to obtain their ID. While in the past this was met with some resistance, government assurances are that this should lower risks of fraud and document use and provide added convenience.

A Pew Research survey on How Americans View Data Privacy found Republican concerns up (77% from 63%), Democrats’ concerns down slightly (65% from 66%) compared with 2019 and both sides saying they’d support more legislation on how consumer data is used. The survey also looked at age, education and race and evolving views on AI.

Google has released its Legislative Framework to Protect Children and Teens Online, which outlines its principles for laws that can keep children safer using the Internet. And, while it cautions lawmakers to take care not to hurt corporations, it alludes to the value of legislative models of age-appropriate design principles and priorities stressed by child rights advocacy groups.

The bot automatically identifies and removes PII in interaction data.

The company’s products focus on ensuring that people really are who they claim to be across the user journey, eliminating the gaps that attackers exploit.

Perhaps not the clearest transition, given the alliteration and nearly identical words, but Google is paving the way for a transition soon to Passkeys (aka biometric scans of your finger or face – or if you prefer to stick with P you can swap your password for a PIN. Aside from questions about privacy, rest assured this should be 40% faster than how you currently log in.

Take heed and act if your site uses third-party cookies because as you know, Chrome will disable them by Q3 2024. So before then, you should be completely settled into the Privacy Sandbox. How to do that? Google offers the Cookie Countdown series first steps.

California’s governor has signed the Delete Act (SB 362) into law expanding the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) to require that all data brokers in the state honor delete requests made through a single mechanism that California’s Privacy Protection Agency (CPPA) will create. This is despite objections from business groups and the ad industry. It also requires data brokers to notify CCPA if they hold sensitive data.

What’s even more private than your name, email address, and hand and face prints? Your genetic code, which is why several little-known laws are getting more attention – the first is in Illinois, home of the famous Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), but less well known is that Montana and California also have GIPAs – Genetic Information Privacy Acts. These protect information gathered via genetic testing from sites such as 23andMe, which has just had a purported hack of data on Ashkenazi Jews.

AI tool, PimEyes has facial recognition technology even Google didn’t want to use. The website offers reverse image searching using face photo scans and finds matches across the web. While the company claims it’s used for helping people monitor their web presence, it’s also collected many images of children and adds dead people to its database.  Where will we decide to draw the line??

Industry lawsuits in California, Arkansas and Texas have been used to block recent laws meant to protect children.