The Login Experience

The login experience has gotten more and more complicated over the years and every website has their own way to do it. When logging into a new website, we are presented with options to sign in with Google, Facebook and other platforms that make the login experience apparently more seamless. But what about using actual login information and what does that mean for your privacy?

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France Fines Google and Facebook

France recently fined Google and Facebook for hampering users’ ability to stop the companies tracking their online activity. According to BBC, French regulators have hit Google and Facebook with fines totalling 210m euros over the use of cookies. The French data privacy watchdog Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés, the CNIL, said both sites were making it difficult for internet users to refuse the online trackers.

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India Adopting Data Privacy Laws

India is the latest country on the list to adopt federal data privacy laws for their citizens. According to The Times of India, the two-decade-old Information Technology Act, 2000 (IT Act), the existing governing law, hasn’t been able to keep up with the rapid advancements in technology. With India recently witnessing a massive increase in cyberattacks, cybercriminals have been steadily discovering new ways to obtain sensitive personal information.

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ID.me Partners with IRS

applications. Individual taxpayers and tax professionals are required to verify with ID.me to NIST 800-63-3 IAL2+Liveness and AAL2 for secure login. These identity proofing services are crucial for the IRS to ensure millions of taxpayers and tax professionals can securely access the IRS and its applications.” What you may not know is that they are collecting biometric data in the process. In the United States as it currently stands, there is no single, comprehensive federal law regulating the collection and use of biometric data. Does that concern you?

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Amazon Mishandling Customer Data

ticle recently surfaced about Amazon mishandling customer data back in 2018. The article states that, “according to internal documents from the Center for Investigative Reporting and WIRED, Amazon’s vast empire of customer data—its metastasizing record of what you search for, what you buy, what shows you watch, what pills you take, what you say to Alexa, and who’s at your front door—had become so sprawling, fragmented, and promiscuously handled within the company that the security division couldn’t even map all of it, much less adequately defend its borders.”

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Revocable Consent

Revocable consent is the right for a user to revoke access to a piece of personal information at any time. We run into it time and time again where websites and companies aren’t actually allowing us to rescind our data when we feel like it. There is always some sort of “30 day” clause or fine print that we happen to miss when we accept the terms and conditions.

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Apple’s App Tracking Transparency

Apple released the App Tracking Transparency feature back in April with the iOS14.5 update, but many people still haven’t heard about it. There are so many new privacy protections being put in place privately and federally that are threatening the flow of user data which companies rely on to target consumers with online ads. How does this App Tracking Transparency feature work and why should you care?

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What are Pixel Tags?

There seems to be so many unknowns today as we browse the internet. A large majority of consumers open their device, navigate to a site, complete a transaction and resume their day as usual without giving any thought to the processes behind their browsing session. Then individuals open Facebook a few hours later to see an advertisement for the winter boots they just purchased in their Google Chrome web browser. How is that possible? Let’s talk about it.

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