The data of millions of patients may have been collected by Facebook (Meta) via healthcare provider websites without people’s knowledge or consent. This comes via a Jane Doe, a claimant who alleges the company harvested her data via Meta Pixel code, which was embedded into a California health care center portal. This and a lawsuit last month, also from California, allege violation of California privacy regulation.
The European Union’s Court of Justice (CJEU) ruling this week in an anti-corruption case has legal experts considering broad implications, including for adtech, online platforms and apps due to liability from inferences drawn from personal data. The court’s decision relates to GDPR’s Article 9, which focuses on processing special categories of data and protecting personal sensitive data. The top EU court determined publishing the name of a spouse or partner amounts to processing sensitive data because it can reveal sexual orientation. This may remove a loophole in holding behavioral data that Big Tech and others have relied upon.
“Forget about it!” That’s pretty much the message from India’s government, which just nixed passing its Personal Data Protection Bill by withdrawing the bill this week without apology or explanation. Thus, the world’s largest democracy has opted to deny more than 1 billion people protection of this critical human right. Of course, this is the same government that recently saw fit to antagonize VPNs and cloud services operating there by establishing rights for aggressive collection of data at the whim of law enforcement or other officials.
Salesforce is buying Airkit.ai, which builds low-code, AI-powered e-commerce customer service agents. You might have thought Salesforce could already do that, but presumably Airkit does it better. It doesn’t hurt that the company founders sold a previous business to Salesforce, the company was partly funded by Salesforce Ventures, and the product is already listed on AppExchange. Price was not announced.