My facial recognition skills are not great, but AI has the power to adapt CNN into the surveillance system to target which people to send to the prison unlawfully.
While General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has measurably improved the privacy rights in Europe, it has stamped into the worst problems with the laws that suffer from an enforcement gap- a wide disparity between the stated protections in theory and the reality of how companies respond to it. It led companies and European countries to invest significant resources in designing regulatory compliance programs, but it didn’t make them really care about customer’s privacy.
“You can’t protect data if you don’t know where it is.”
Unknown
In 2023, five years after GDPR enforcement, the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) pressed charges of €1.2 billion on Meta. This record-breaking fine was issued for transferring personal data of European users to the United States without adequate data protection mechanisms and serves as a significant milestone in data protection regulation.
In 2021, the Luxembourg National Commission for Data Protection (CNDP) issued a fine of €746 million ($888 million) to Amazon.com Inc. The CNPD opened an investigation into how Amazon processes personal data of its customers and found infringements regarding Amazon’s advertising targeting system that was carried out without proper consent.
In 2018 the data breach arose from a bug in Twitter’s design, due to which, if a user on an Android device changed the email address associated with their Twitter account, the protected tweets became unprotected and therefore accessible to anyone (including authorities) without the user’s knowledge.
In 2022 Saudi student at Leeds University after returning home for a holiday was sentenced to 34 years in prison for having a Twitter account and for following and retweeting dissidents and activists.
VisionLabs, owned by MTS and headquartered in the Netherlands, has created a world-leading facial recognition technology. In 2022 at least 141 people were detained preventively via facial recognition, according to data from OVD-Info. Facial recognition technology uses artificial intelligence algorithms to analyze and identify people.
In Moscow more than 160,000 cameras have been installed across the city - more than 3,000 of them connected to the facial recognition system - have helped law enforcement. Now more than 2,000 court cases show these cameras have played an important role in the arrests of hundreds of protesters. Most of these people were detained in 2021 after they joined anti-government demonstrations.
How to implement tracking respecting the customers privacy?
Even though the purpose of tracking is to monitor the usage of a website, this can still be done without collecting any personal data or personally identifiable information (PII), without using cookies and while respecting the privacy of the website visitors.
Tracking solutions are often overrated in terms of its usability. Finding the right tools for your business product analysis can help you establish a better control over what data is necessary for the analysis and reporting to make business decisions, and which tools are supporting it while staying respectful to visitor’s privacy.
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A/B testing
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Product level recording for funnel and retention analysis, user paths, behavioral cohorts and other UX metrics
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software monitoring and observability (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana)
Most of the A/B testing providers use local storage to store IDs at user-level cookies to track user journeys and understand their behavior across the website. Marketers primarily deal with
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First-party cookies that are sent to an internal server
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Third-party cookies created by external domains that send them to third-party servers such as LinkedIn, Google or Meta.
Cookies from third-parties allow any information from your visitors to be shared with, sent to or sold to anyone, including advertisers’, so they’re seen as intrusive and highly invasive of user privacy.
Anonymizing the data to avoid tracing across platforms based on information that relates to an identified or identifiable living individual
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anonymizing the IP addresses
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aggregate data to prevent identification of individual users
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use pseudonymization techniques to protect any personally identifiable information (PII)
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disable User-ID tracking that makes it substantially harder for most advertisers and data brokers to track you
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disable data sharing settings that sends the data to third party services
Limited data sharing
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configure data retention settings to automatically delete user and event data after a certain period
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allow users to manage their preferences (when they need it)
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collect the data that is crucial only for business decisions and analysis
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use cookie-less tracking providers- Plausible, PostHog, matomo, umami
Find the privacy-first tracking tools- transparency about their data policy that describes not only how the companies are handling their customer’s data but also full disclosure from their clients.
If you can’t find the answers about the data policy from the document, AI might do it for you. Jason Mayes showed an example to upload PDFs and chat about data privacy via platform AskYourPDF.
Personal data
Personal data to be removed/pseudonymized from data collections and recordings
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a name and surname;
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a home address;
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an email address such as name.surname@company.com;
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an identification card number;
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location data (for example the location data function on a mobile phone)*;
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an Internet Protocol (IP) address;
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a cookie ID*;
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the advertising identifier of your phone;
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data held by a hospital or doctor, which could be a symbol that uniquely identifies a person.
Listen about the “Privacy-First Architecture” in JSNation by Andrey Sitnik
https://portal.gitnation.org/contents/how-to-make-your-open-source-project-popular
Other sources:
European Data Protection Board
https://www.edpb.europa.eu/our-work-tools/documents/our-documents_en
How to Choose a Privacy Compliant A/B Testing Tool https://www.convert.com/blog/privacy/how-to-buy-privacy-compliant-ab-testing-tool/
Hacking the browser to digital twin our users
https://youtu.be/cWxpp9HwLYw?feature=shared
Jason Mayes “Web Apps of the Future With Web AI” on JSNation
https://portal.gitnation.org/contents/web-apps-of-the-future-with-web-ai
Thanks to the JSNation team and GitNation for the photos and beautiful event at Kapitein Anna!