France says no to “Free” Office365 and Google Workspace in schools

Free service offers such as Office365 and Google Workspace are excluded from public procurement according to the French Ministry. Their position reflects ongoing European concerns about cloud data sovereignty, competition, and privacy rules. Paid versions of these cloud services might be an option if they hadn’t already been disallowed based on worries about data safety. … Read more

Sanction of 800,000 euros for Discord

The CNIL pronounced against the company Discord INC. a fine of 800,000 euros for failing to comply with several GDPR obligations, in particular with regard to retention periods and the security of personal data. Discord is a voice over IP (technology that allows users to chat via their microphone and/or webcam over the Internet) and … Read more

Danish privacy regulator bans standard use of Google Analytics

Danish organizations and companies are no longer allowed to use Google Analytics unless they take additional measures such as setting up a proxy, the Danish privacy regulator has ruled. In doing so, the Danish data protection authority follows other European privacy regulators, including those from Austria, Italy and France, who also prohibit the use of … Read more

Is Oracle surveilling 5 billion people?

Oracle is an important part of the tracking and data industry. It has claimed to have amassed detailed dossiers on 5 billion people, and generates $42.4 billion in annual revenue. Oracle’s dossiers about people include names, home addresses, emails, purchases online and in the real world, physical movements in the real world, income, interests and … Read more

EU Courts’ ruling requires to protect data that indirectly relates to sensitive information

Companies will be under increased pressure after Europe’s top court ruled they must apply special protections to data that firms previously didn’t consider sensitive such as health, religion, political views and sexual orientation. The European Court of Justice on Aug. 1 determined that public officials in Lithuania had their sensitive data revealed because their spouses’ … Read more

Study on Privacy Risks of the Metaverse

This study by Vivek Nair, Dwan Song (both of UC Berkeley) and Gonzalo Munilla Garrido (Technical University of Munich) sheds a light on the unprecedented privacy risks of the metaverse by showing how VR can be turned against its users and provides the first holistic framework for understanding intrusive data harvesting attacks in these emerging … Read more

60% of Databreach costs raise prices for customers

Sixty percent of breaches have resulted in companies recouping the cost of fines, clean-up, and technological improvements by increasing prices, essentially making consumers pay for breaches and companies’ lack of preparedness, according to the “Cost of Data Breach Report 2022”.

Metaverse and privacy

The use of the metaverse can be very intrusive as the set of data processed in this environment increases exponentially. Any virtual environment is by design fully data-enabled and allows for a broader spectrum of information related to human activities to be processed. In particular, it may involve new categories of data with greater granularity and precision. For … Read more