The third annual report from the cybersecurity research team at Comparitech found less Google Play App compliance with the US Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) than in previous years. More than two in five apps of the 500 surveyed may violate COPPA as compared with 1 in 5 apps in 2022, and 1 in 4 apps in 2023.
In a major kid privacy change, Instagram announced all teen accounts in the US, UK, Canada and Australia are getting new protective settings that limit the types of content young people ages 18 and younger can see and restrict who can contact them. Teens under 16 will be required to get parental permission to change the default settings. This privacy plan will roll out to more countries beginning early 2025.
The law had been instituted during the pandemic to help restaurants recover from the business downturn. It was challenged by delivery companies on the grounds of the First Amendment for violating customer privacy.
BrightEdge reports that, despite huge growth, AI search engines still provide less than 1% of website referral traffic. You might think that’s a reason to ignore your ranking in AI search engines, but BrightEdge argues those rankings are still important because the main role of AI search is discovery, not referrals. Seems like a testable hypothesis. What we know for certain is that over-all traffic has dropped as users switch from traffic-generating traditional search to traffic-stifling AI search engines.