Malawi, which has no privacy law, currently has a children’s ID collection program underway with the intent to register 8.4 million of its children under age 16. The program is part of the national Digital Malawi program which has the goal of linking all Malawi citizens to a government database. Privacy advocates are concerned about the scope of the data being collected, potential for use in government surveillance, and that biometric data is being collected on children as young as newborns.
This coincides with the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC)’s announcement it is launching an investigation into Twitter, which admitted that a vulnerability affecting its servers and related to 5.4 million users had been exploited.
ChatGPT is reportedly the fastest growing Web app ever, passing 100 million active users in just over two months. How cool is that? Cool enough that Google is releasing something similar – the Bard chatbot – “in the coming weeks”. They promise many more AI-enabled applications to come.