Privacy Transformation - Issue 1

Hello, and a very warm welcome to the first ever issue of the Privacy Transformation Newsletter!

It's my hope for this newsletter to bring together relevant, topical and thoughtful data privacy news & resources of interest to the privacy community and beyond.

Thank you sincerely for your interest, I hope you find it useful and I look forward to sharing this Privacy Transformation journey with you.

- Alan

NEWS

Irish Data Protection Commission opens first investigation into Google

The State’s data watchdog has opened its first investigation into Google to examine a suspected infringement of EU privacy rules covering the sharing of personal data of internet users.

Understanding the Digital Advertising Ecosystem and the Impact of Data Privacy and Competition Policy | United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary

Here you can watch the video of the testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee who held a hearing aimed to address the intersecting issues between online advertising, privacy, and competition in the digital economy.

Among the witnesses to testify was Johnny Ryan, Chief Policy & Industry Relations Officer at Brave, who has been a consistent advocate of reigning in the practice of Real-time Bidding (RTB), calling it a data protection-free zone.

Irish data watchdog probing WhatsApp security breach

The Irish data watchdog is probing the WhatsApp attack to determine if European users have been affected by the breach.

RESOURCES

Demystifying Hidden Privacy Settings in Mobile Apps

Mobile Apps include privacy settings that allow their users to configure how their data should be shared. These settings, however, are often hard to locate and hard to understand by the users, even in popular apps, such as Facebook. More seriously, they are often set to share user data by default, exposing her privacy without proper consent.

Recently presented at the 2019 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, this paper is a systematic study of the problem, made possible through an in-depth analysis of users perceptions of privacy settings.