Apple, which often tries to lead on behalf of user privacy, may have to pull its App Tracking Transparency (ATT) privacy mechanism away from EU users since lobbyists including in Germany and Italy have been contesting the mechanism in favor of allowing app tracking for ads. This is despite GDPR regulations and in favor of mass data collection and use for sales and commerce.
The European Commission announced TikTok and Meta aren’t meeting obligations to the Digital Services Act (DSA). The preliminary findings, which will be followed by investigation, claim serious violations. One is that the companies make it difficult for researchers to view data, inhibiting their ability to judge if there’s illegal, biased, or dangerous content. This violates DSA transparency rules. And, in Meta’s case, Facebook and Instagram were assessed as not allowing users to flag or remove illegal or harmful content, which should be done via a “Notice & Action” mechanism.
Bangladesh is about to get its first major privacy law, the Personal Data Protection Ordinance, which has been passed and is expected to be issued as a notification and then would go into effect in eighteen months. This would align Bangladesh with international privacy standards and be in keeping with other privacy laws in Asia, including India’s which was enacted in 2023.
Meta has announced agreements with USA Today, People Inc., and other news publishers to pay for access to their content and link to their articles in its AI chatbot. It’s a sharp contrast to Perplexity, which the Chicago Tribune and New York Times are separately suing for allegedly scraping content and bypassing paywalls. Despite this deal, Meta apparently still opposes compensating publishers for news links in social media posts.