Ethiopia is another country moving ahead with federal privacy legislation. Its House of Representatives passed the Personal Data Protection Proclamation (PDPP) to safeguard the data of individuals and legislate data collection and processing. This is being done in tandem with plans to issue digital IDs to all categories of citizens, including refugees.
The US may have moved closer to a federal privacy bill with the newly fashioned American Privacy Rights Act (APRA). The bipartisan bill introduced by Washington State lawmakers, one a Democrat and the other a Republican, draws on US state privacy laws and on tenets of GDPR. It posits a private right of action for recourse against companies for non-deletion of data or not obtaining proper consent, a right for individuals to opt out of ads, and the right to prevent transfer or sale of their data.
Beyond buying and selling data, the data broker infrastructure also accrues data via feeds from third-party trackers, tags and pixels. A new report from privacy and security company, Lokker, looked at web privacy across more than 3,400 sites and shows broad use of these identifiers with 47% of websites using Meta Pixel, including 55% of S&P 500, 58% of retail, 42% of financial, and 33% of healthcare.
It’s deal-making time for generative AI model builders and publishers who can provide them with quality data. Germany publishing giant Axel Springer is trading access to its data for Microsoft adtech, AI, and Azure hosting solutions. Meanwhile, The Financial Times has struck a deal with OpenAI to license its content with attribution of summaries and quotes.