Australia has been the target of major data breaches in recent months and now a massive records hack has been announced by consumer finance group, Latitude Group Holdings. Included are numbers from nearly 8 million Australian and New Zealand driver’s licenses, 53,000 passport numbers, and more than 6 million customer records.
This ranks as one of Australia’s biggest data thefts, after Singapore Telecommunications’, Optus’ and Medibank’s.
Civil rights group, NOYB (abbr. for “none of your business”), founded by activist Max Schrems, filed complaints in Berlin against Germany’s major political parties claiming violation of General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) during the 2021 election campaign. The goal is to stop the microtargeting of online political advertising and its processing, a practice that has become widespread, including in the UK and US. GDPR does protect the data of people’s political views. This follows a vote last month by the European Parliament to ban political microtargeting on online platforms.
The French National Assembly has proposed a controversial law critics worry will cross a new frontier in video surveillance. Article 7 of the “Bill relating to the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games” has been condemned by human rights organizations for permitting algorithmic AI video surveillance to be used at major events, possibly as soon as the Rugby World Cup in September, and subsequently at the 2024 Paris Olympic Games. Algorithmic video surveillance is a new area of machine technology that utilizes AI to monitor, learn from and assess behavior and movement over time, so for example in this scenario, to anticipate crowd movement and predict and alert about “risky” behavior, based on AI estimation.
Google lashed out at the Department of Justice’s threat to break up the company, calling the proposals “radical.” Among other things, Google says the proposals would threaten users’ privacy, stifle innovation and break Android and Chrome. Given the appeals process, it will likely be years before we know whether Google will stay in one piece.