Local Privacy Laws in a Globalized World

Personal data has emerged as a highly valuable yet sensitive asset that drives business decisions, enables targeted advertising, and generates substantial revenue for companies, while simultaneously facilitating invasive monitoring of users. In recent years, research on digital privacy violations...

WordPress plugin Complianz – GDPR/CCPA Cookie Consent 安全漏洞

WordPress and WordPress plugins are both products of the WordPress Foundation. WordPress is a blog platform developed using the PHP language. This platform allows for the creation of personal blog websites on servers based on PHP and MySQL. A WordPress plugin is an application extension. There is...

Global Web, Local Privacy? an International Review of Web Tracking

Web tracking by ad networks, social networks, and other third parties is privacy-invasive. To protect users' privacy an increasing number of countries are adopting new privacy laws. However, a major reason why their application on the web is so challenging is that privacy laws are local while the...

How Data Brokers Can Fuel Violence Against Public Servants

A new report from the Public Service Alliance finds state privacy laws offer public servants few ways to protect their private data, even as threats against them are on the rise...

Roku accused of selling children’s data to advertisers and brokers

The state of Florida has accused Roku, which powers many smart TVs and streaming devices, of selling children's data to third parties without their consent. According to the Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, Roku collected viewing habits, voice recordings, and precise geolocation from kids...

Cookies and how to bake them: what they are for, associated risks, and what session hijacking has to do with it

When you visit almost any website, you'll see a pop-up asking you to accept, decline, or customize the cookies it collects. Sometimes, it just tells you that cookies are in use by default. We randomly checked 647 websites, and 563 of them displayed cookie notifications. Most of the time, users...

Many data brokers are failing to register with state consumer protection agencies

Hundreds of data brokers haven't registered with state consumer protection agencies, according to The Electronic Frontier Foundation EFF and Privacy Rights Clearinghouse PRC. There are different kinds of data brokers, but what they all have in common is that they gather personally identifiable...

Smart air fryers ordered to stop invading our digital privacy

In a confirmation that we've gone full Black Mirror, the UK's privacy czar has wagged a finger at air fryer manufacturers and told them to stop playing with our data. New draft guidance from the Information Commissioner's Office ICO targets not just air fryer vendors but manufacturers of any smar...

Navigating Cookie Consent Violations across the Globe

Online services provide users with cookie banners to accept/reject the cookies placed on their web browsers. Despite the increased adoption of cookie banners, little has been done to ensure that cookie consent is compliant with privacy laws around the globe. Prior studies have found that cookies...

Webinar: Learn How to Build a Reasonable and Legally Defensible Cybersecurity Program

It's not enough to be secure. In today's legal climate, you need to prove it. Whether you're protecting a small company or managing compliance across a global enterprise, one thing is clear: cybersecurity can no longer be left to guesswork, vague frameworks, or best-effort intentions. Regulators...

E.U. Court Limits Meta's Use of Personal Facebook Data for Targeted Ads

Europe's top court has ruled that Meta Platforms must restrict the use of personal data harvested from Facebook for serving targeted ads even when users consent to their information being used for advertising purposes, a move that could have serious consequences for ad-driven companies operating ...

Meta's 'Pay or Consent' Approach Faces E.U. Competition Rules Scrutiny

Meta's decision to offer an ad-free subscription in the European Union E.U. has faced a new setback after regulators accused the social media behemoth of breaching the bloc's competition rules by forcing users to choose between seeing ads or paying to avoid them. The European Commission said the...

Facebook’s Extensive Surveillance Network

Consumer Reports is reporting that Facebook has built a massive surveillance network: Using a panel of 709 volunteers who shared archives of their Facebook data, Consumer Reports found that a total of 186,892 companies sent data about them to the social network. On average, each participant in th...

Shifting from reCAPTCHA to hCaptcha

We are adding another CAPTCHA vendor and helping our customers migrate from Googles reCAPTCHA to hCaptcha. Why We Are Making This Change We continuously evaluate our security measures to ensure they align with the evolving landscape of threats. After carefully evaluating several different CAPTCHA...

YouTube shows ads for ad blocker, financial scams

After performing local experiments for a few months, YouTube recently expanded its effort to block ad blockers. The move was immediately unpopular with some users, and raised some questions in Europe about whether it was breaking privacy laws. In addition, there are some still some fundamental...

Meta Launches Paid Ad-Free Subscription in Europe to Satisfy Privacy Laws

Meta on Monday announced plans to offer an ad-free option to access Facebook and Instagram for users in the European Union EU, European Economic Area EEA, and Switzerland to comply with "evolving" data protection regulations in the region. The ad-free subscription, which costs €9.99/month on the...

Food delivery robots give captured video footage to police

In what sounds like a new step towards Skynet, footage from a food delivery robot has been used as part of a criminal investigation. As 404 Media reports, the food delivery robots that are deployed for Uber Eats in Los Angeles are operated by Serve Robotics, which ultimately wants to deploy up to...

The Twisted Eye in the Sky Over Buenos Aires

A scandal unfolding in Argentina shows the dangers of implementing facial recognition—even with laws and limits in place...

Software company accused of illegally profiling millions of mobile phone users

A digital rights and privacy organization has filed a complaint against software company TeleSign for gathering and selling information on millions of mobile phone users. The organization that filed the complaint is nyob. nyob is an Austrian based digital right organization that focusses on...

Microsoft to Pay $20 Million Penalty for Illegally Collecting Kids' Data on Xbox

Microsoft has agreed to pay a penalty of $20 million to settle U.S. Federal Trade Commission FTC charges that the company illegally collected and retained the data of children who signed up to use its Xbox video game console without their parents' knowledge or consent. "Our proposed order makes i...