Just a quick reminder that the provisions of the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA) go into effect on the 1st July. Technically, it came into effect last year, but it also granted a 1 year grace period to become compliant, and that grace period expires on the 30th of June 2021. Failure to comply […]
Tag Archives: Online Privacy
In the wake of the collapse of the EU-US Privacy Shield Agreement, France’s privacy watchdog CNIL (Commission nationale de l’informatique et des libertés) announced last month that it was imposing a fine of 100 million Euros on Google’s parent company Alphabet, and 35 million Euros on Amazon for breaching rules regarding cookies used for online […]
A poorly explained and understood announcement by Facebook recently has led to unprecedented growth in the user bases of both Signal and Telegram, rivals to the Facebook-owned WhatsApp. In the week after the Facebook announcement, which notified users of WhatsApp that they would lose access to the platform after February 8th unless they accepted the […]
As we all know, online privacy, the security of user data, and the use which that data is put to have become significant issues at this stage of the evolution of our digital environment. As part of efforts to address those concerns, the EU passed the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) in 2018, which governed […]
Although parts of the POPI (Protection Of Personal Information) Act have technically been in force for some time already, the remaining (and most important) provisions have not yet been adopted. Last week however, the Chairperson of the Information Regulator of South Africa indicated that her office had requested the President adopt the remaining provisions and […]
According to internal messages leaked from Facebook earlier this month, top-level employees strategised about how they could leverage the vast quantity of user data Facebook controls in order to limit or disadvantage companies which they perceive as threats, including YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. Although Facebook does not sell user data, it does share some of […]
At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing earlier this month, Karan Bhatia, Google’s VP of Public Policy, admitted that the company’s controversial plan to re-launch its search engine in China while complying with the country’s restrictive internet censorship laws had been underway, but said that that it had been cancelled. The new Chinese version of Google […]
After the relatively recent Cambridge Analytica scandal which saw Facebook user data being harvested and used for political campaign purposes, the Federal Trade Commission in the US began investigating the social media platform, for a potential breach of a 2011 agreement with the platform regarding consumer privacy. Of course, that’s only one of a number […]
Following on from recent scandals surrounding the live-streaming of suicides on Facebook, the company last year launched an ambitious project to use artificial intelligence to detect when users might be likely to commit suicide, or otherwise self-harm. The algorithm analyses almost all posts made on Facebook, and rates each one with according to the probability […]
The Protection Of Personal Information Act (No 4 of 2013) has been hovering in the background for quite some time already. Its intention is to bring the practices governing data collection and direct marketing in South Africa into line with European standards and guidelines governing these issues, and although the Act was first published in […]
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