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"Chinese consumers are increasingly standing up to Internet giants for their digital privacy in an unprecedented way. China is in the early stages of setting up a data protection regulatory system. The Cyber Security Law, effective Jun 1, 2017, included for the first time a set of data protection provisions in the form of national-level legislation. The 2018 e-Commerce Law incorporated data privacy protections for consumers such as the "right to be forgotten", similar to the EU's General Data Protection Regulation."

"DATA LEVERAGE CAN be deployed through at least four avenues: direct action (for instance, individuals banding together to withhold, "poison," or redirect data), regulatory action (for instance, pushing for data protection policy and legal recognition of "data coalitions"), legal action (for instance, communities adopting new data-licensing regimes or pursuing a lawsuit), and market action (for instance, demanding large language models be trained only with data from consenting creators). "

"The reason is that routine big-data analytical techniques can now effectively manufacture personal data that is not protected by any of the measures we've used up to now. A well-known illustration of this is the way Target, an American retail chain, creatively collated scattered pieces of data about individuals' changes in shopping habits to predict the delivery date of pregnant shoppers - so that they could then be targeted with relevant advertisements."

"A school in Poland has been fined €4,600 ($5,200) for breaching Europe's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) after it was found to be processing students' fingerprint data to verify whether they had paid for school lunch. The news comes as biometric data harnessing programs around the world spark significant privacy concerns."

"TikTok has been fined £12.7m for illegally processing the data of 1.4 million children under 13 who were using its platform without parental consent, Britain's data watchdog said. The information commissioner said the China-owned video app had done "very little, if anything" to check who was using the platform and remove underage users, despite internal warnings the firm was flouting its own terms and conditions."

""This online system has left the population's Covid vaccine statuses exposed to absolutely anyone to pry into. Date of birth and postcode are fields of data that can be easily found or bought, even on the electoral roll. "This is personal health information that could easily be exploited by companies, insurers, employers or scammers. Robust protections must be put in place immediately and an urgent investigation should be opened to establish how such basic privacy protections could be missing from one of the most sensitive health databases in the country.""

"Google released a beta test version of its Chrome browser that attempts to keep your data secure even if today's uncrackable encryption becomes tomorrow's code-breaking cakewalk. The Chrome 54 beta gets the ability to encipher data sent to and from websites with a technology called CECPQ1. It "protects against future attacks using large quantum computers," Google said in a blog post Thursday."

"On the surface of it, the incident is entirely trivial: in a thoughtless moment, a police officer on a surveillance helicopter decides to tweet a photo of a celebrity he's spotted (in this case Michael McIntyre), briefly adding the Metropolitan police to the ranks of London paparazzi. The Met's snap had a few features a standard press photo lacks, though, including an exact timestamp, location data, and a vantage point from an expensive and taxpayer-funded aerial spot. Online reaction to the photograph was predictably bad - why are police invading the privacy of someone who's doing nothing wrong? - and was followed by questioning whether the photo breached the Data Protection Act, which it may well have done."

"The universities admissions service, Ucas, broke data protection rules when it signed up teenagers to receive adverts about mobile phones, energy drinks and other products, the information commissioner has ruled."

""The people who are on the list are not guilty until they've been prosecuted and taken to court, and the system makes that very clear", Simon says - and under the Data Protection Act "if anyone misuses that data there are very significant fines". Simon is also sanguine about the risk of misidentification. Images from the watch list will be sent with alerts so staff can check that there's a good match, he says. "

" The children's charity NSPCC has called on Facebook to resume a programme that scanned private messages for indications of child abuse, with new data suggesting that almost half of referrals for child sexual abuse material are now falling below the radar. Recent changes to the European commission's e-privacy directive, which are being finalised, require messaging services to follow strict new restrictions on the privacy of message data. Facebook blamed that directive for shutting down the child protection operation, but the children's charity says Facebook has gone too far in reading the law as banning it entirely."

"These ranged from the mundane (Facebook may change its terms of service at any time) to a reminder that Facebook may store and process your data anywhere in the world, meaning it might be subject to different data protection laws. When scanning license agreements from Google, Do Not Sign told me the company reserves the right to stop providing its services at any time and that its services are used at the users' sole risk."

This discrepancy has made it relatively easy to connect an anonymous line of data to a specific person: if a private detective is searching for someone in New York City and knows the subject is male, is 30 to 35 years old and has diabetes, the sleuth would not be able to deduce the man's name-but could likely do so quite easily if he or she also knows the target's birthday, number of children, zip code, employer and car model.

"Owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, TikTok's success - more than 1 billion users worldwide - is combining with well-established fears about social media's data collection practices and concerns over China's geo-political ambitions to generate a background hum of distrust about the app. "As the geopolitical situation changes I suspect we will see companies such as TikTok will continue to be treated with some caution in the west," says Alan Woodward, a professor of cybersecurity at Surrey University."

By connecting laptops and smartphones to enormous, remote computing banks, cloud computing gives us access to more processing power than could ever fit in any one of those devices, along with access to all our data and documents from anywhere in the world.

"Given the government's obsession with passing cybersecurity legislation, you would think they'd be happy that Apple and Google are making it harder for foreign governments and criminals to break into people's phones or company servers to steal your data. But you'd be forgetting that the head of the FBI and his fellow fear-mongerers are still much more concerned with making sure they retain control over your privacy, rather than protecting everyone's cybersecurity."

"Digital Identity (ID) is one of the main results focused under the main Digital Drukyul Flagship Program of Nu 2.557 bn as the fund also covers results such as Institutionalizing e-Patient Information System, creating Digital Schools, Integrating e-business services (business licensing and Single window for trade), Land records, tax information etc. Citing some examples of what benefits people can expect with the completion of the Digital ID Lobzang Jamtsho, Chief ICT Officer, Application Development Division, Department of Technology and Telecom (DITT) under Ministry of Information and Communication (MoIC) said stated, "Currently the online processes are hybrid in nature, where although we communicate or negotiate online, people still need to be physically present to sign a contract or make online transactions." He said that with the use of Digital ID, one can have bank transactions or even sign up contracts remotely to state a few components that the program encapsulates. The paper found that the biggest advantage of the Digital ID of the person is that all the information of the person will be stored and based around the Digital ID of the person. This could be health records, land records, tax records, revenue and bank records, business records, education records, census records etc. The person can use his digital ID to access all this information and also use his ID to complete online procedures to avail services. To protect the privacy of the person access to the information will be compartmentalized and restricted so some tax officials for example cannot access the health records of a person. A key component of digital ID is collecting the biometric details of people like eyes and all finger prints for verification and security."

"To start we need a new human right to "cognitive liberty", which would come with an update to other existing human rights to privacy, freedom of thought and self-determination. All told it would protect our freedom of thought and rumination, mental privacy, and self-determination over our brains and mental experiences. It would change the default rules so we have rights around the commodification of our brain data. "

"Launched in 2006, 23andMe sells tests to determine consumers' genetic ancestry and risk of developing certain illnesses, using saliva samples sent in by mail. Privacy advocates and researchers have long raised concerns about a for-profit company owning the genetic data of millions of people, fears that have only intensified with news of the partnership."