More than 500 GB of sensitive data from China was published online, including internal data as well as material from Chinese “Belt and Road” export agreements with countries including Myanmar, Pakistan, Ethiopia, and Kazakhstan.
A former head of WhatsApp security filed suit against Meta, saying executives including Mark Zuckerberg, ignored and then retaliated against him for raising cybersecurity alarms about user data. This comes as two current and two former Meta employees told the US Congress the company may have suppressed findings about Instagram damaging teen girls’ mental health.
A new California bill that would require browsers to include a tool to make it easier for consumers to opt out of behavioral ads has been approved by the legislature and has been sent to Governor Gavin Newsom. Newsom vetoed a similar industry-opposed bill last year, and it’s not clear whether he’ll accept this one.
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.