No need to wait to see if you’ll consent or not, many companies, including Meta, TikTok and this Top Ten list of offenders, are pleased to snag email addresses and personal identifiers while you’re filling out forms. This KU Leuven and Radboud University study of the top 100K websites found 1,844 websites visited from the EU, and 2,950 visited from the US had email addresses exfiltrated.
Didomi’s “Data Privacy Barometer” shows at-a-glance which country laws are approved, enforced and still in draft; compares data collecting and tracking across 14 industries; and provides a snapshot of consent volume by industry.
Thoughtlab’s benchmark study of 1,200 diverse large organizations in 16 countries found that while more than $125.2 billion annually has been spent to shore up this area, the rapidly evolving threat landscape has many companies at significant risk. Weak links are: complexity of supply chain (44%), rapid digital innovation (41%), and inadequate budget plus lack of executive support (28% each).
Like trouble, bad behavior by Meta shows up whether you look for it or not. The latest is an open-source language model that was supposed to provide reliable search results because it was trained on academic papers. Alas, it was quickly withdrawn after reviewers found that it returned results that were grammatical and plausible but also incorrect, not to mention filled with “antisemitism, homophobia, and misogyny.” How can this be a surprise?