CDP Institute

The Biden administration passed a ban on TikTok in its spending bill this week. This is due to ongoing concern about TikTok, which is owned by ByteDance, over security practices. At the same time, ByteDance management has conceded several of their employees had gained inappropriate access to user data as reported this fall by Forbes, which claimed the company’s Internal Audit team planned to use data to surveil some individual American citizens.

The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals revived a children’s privacy lawsuit which alleged Google, Hasbro, Mattel, Dreamworks and others had violated state laws that are similar to the federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) by tracking the YouTube activity of children under age 13 without parental consent for the purpose of ad tracking.

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.

Information is processed locally on a smart device which adds protection, since it minimizes transmission to the Cloud.