Tech giants finally face consequences for privacy breaches
Zoom settled for $86m, Amazon gets a $887m fine
We’ve said this over and over: tech giants do not care about your privacy. As long as the fine is less than the profit they make from your data, why should they?
In recent years, EU regulators started acting more harshly and increasingly added pressure on tech giants to follow the rules.
That’s why, for example, YouTube and Google are now a hassle to use (rightfully so) in incognito mode, as they have to disclose how many data points they’re collecting after you click the “Search” button.
Let’s get into the most interesting news of the last few days!
Hot News
Video-conferencing firm Zoom has agreed to pay $86m (£61.9m) to settle a class action privacy lawsuit in the US.
The lawsuit alleged that Zoom had invaded the privacy of millions of users by sharing personal data with Facebook, Google and LinkedIn.
It also accused Zoom of misstating that it offers end-to-end encryption and for failing to prevent hackers from "zoombombing" sessions.
Read the full article on BBC News
Luxembourg’s National Commission for Data Protection (CNPD) has hit Amazon with a record-breaking €746 million ($887 million) GDPR fine over the way it uses customer data for targeted advertising purposes.
Amazon disclosed the ruling in an SEC filing on Friday in which it slammed the decision as baseless and added that it intended to defend itself “vigorously in this matter.”
Read the full article on TechCrunch
The data brokerage business is so lucrative because it’s so easy. There are scarcely any limitations on who can sell information, who can buy it, and who can sell it all over again. Any thoughtful federal privacy legislation would restrict the data that companies can collect from consumers, as well as what those companies can do with it. Simply selling it to the highest bidder should be out of the question. Otherwise, a society stripped of any expectation of personal privacy pays the price.
Read the full article on TheWashingtonPost
Elizabeth Denham, the Information Commissioner, said vaccine passports should only exist for a limited period to deal with the Covid crisis
Read the full article on The Telegraph (note: this is a paid journal offering a free trial of 30 days)
Because privacy costs money, privacy has become a defining marker of class. Below a certain threshold of income, you're prey to the devices and ecosystems that offer themselves up freely – at the cost of any privacy. (Hello Android! Howdy Facebook!) The poor used to be invisible – now they're among the most easily seen segment of society.
Read the full article on The Register
Weekly Updates from SimpleLogin
In our commitment to producing more share-worthy content, we published two new articles you can now find on our blog.
Both articles are designed to help us rank better on Google when users are searching for a new solution for their email alias needs.
We also:
Started promoting our content on Twitter and Linkedin via a syndication network, gathering hundreds of shares;
Connected with the team at BitWarden over a tweet that got popular (thank you for that);
Saw a positive increase in our rankings;
Radically increased our posting schedule on Twitter. We’re now trying to stick to once per day, and sometimes we also go over that;
Saw amazing engagement on our last posts, which we’re very grateful for
Released a 🔥 new feature 🔥: from now on, if your alias gets in a data breach, we’ll send you an email notification;
Going forward, we’ll continue our focus on producing great, shareable content. We’re currently focusing on creating content for beginners, but we’ll start posting content for more advanced users in the foreseeable future.
Our current goal is to publish at least one new blog post per week.
If you have any suggestions, feel free to share an article or a tweet and tag us, we monitor all the mentions daily and try to respond ASAP.
You can also email Giorgio at: giorgio@simplelogin.io if you want to collaborate on some content or suggest a new idea.
👋 See you next week
That’s all for today!
For now, we kept this newsletter private as we wanted to publish some insights before pushing it on our social channels.
You’ll start seeing some posts about our SubStack on Twitter, Reddit, and our blog.
Although we trust SubStack to keep your data private, and of course we will do the same on our end, we encourage you to use an alias to subscribe.
This way, you can be notified if it gets into a breach and quickly change it.
Also, we’ll keep the newsletter feed open, so in case you want to read it without subscribing you can do that as well.
We’d love to have you as a stable subscriber, but we’re not going to force you.
Hope this helps and talk to you soon!
You should host the newsletter on write.as. It's open-source!
This is soo sweet simple login
I love your blogs
You are finally getting the recognition you deserve(but i wish that there is more coming)