California passed an amendment to the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) to add neural data protection under the category of sensitive data. Users can now request, delete, correct, and ask to limit what brain activity data a company collects on them.
Telegram has changed its privacy policy and will now provide judicial authorities with user ID data upon request. The company, which touts strict privacy control, had previously limited cooperation with law enforcement to cases involving suspected terrorists.
In a major kid privacy change, Instagram announced all teen accounts in the US, UK, Canada and Australia are getting new protective settings that limit the types of content young people ages 18 and younger can see and restrict who can contact them. Teens under 16 will be required to get parental permission to change the default settings. This privacy plan will roll out to more countries beginning early 2025.
BrightEdge reports that, despite huge growth, AI search engines still provide less than 1% of website referral traffic. You might think that’s a reason to ignore your ranking in AI search engines, but BrightEdge argues those rankings are still important because the main role of AI search is discovery, not referrals. Seems like a testable hypothesis. What we know for certain is that over-all traffic has dropped as users switch from traffic-generating traditional search to traffic-stifling AI search engines.