Vietnam notified onshore tech companies they must now store financial, biometric and other personal data locally and also set up local offices. Data must be held there for a minimum of two years, and Vietnamese authorities have broad rights to issue data collection requests for investigation. Companies that do not comply will be required to remove content.
The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has investigated the data use and retention practices of the top 15 US mobile carriers and found them well out of compliance. In fact, Verizon has been retaining cell tower location data; T-Mobile has been tracking “timing advance data” (which indicates how far a signal is from a cell tower); and AT&T has been helping itself to call record data. And, while none of the carriers surveyed currently allow people to universally opt out, the FCC is tasking its Enforcement Bureau to launch a new investigation – and they’re inviting users to weigh in with their concerns and privacy complaints.
A new survey of chief data officers and other senior data managers from TripleBlind calls out Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PET) and data collaboration as crucial to ensuring privacy protection and as key revenue drivers. Ninety-four percent believed enforcing existing regulations would increase revenue, and nearly half indicated that expanded data collaboration would give their organizations a competitive advantage. There was also great concern, with 64% of respondents suspecting third-parties would use data in ways not permitted legally.
Microsoft has confirmed that Reddit has blocked its Bing search engine from crawling content; Reddit seems to have blocked DuckDuckGo too. Reddit content will still appear in Google search results, but then Google has paid Reddit $60 million to allow it to train its AI models on that content. Reddit says the block has nothing to do with the Google deal: okay.