Top News – Montana justifies TikTok ban; health data of nearly 4 million leaked in Colorado and more

Personal Data on social media platforms to be protected

12 Data Protection Authorities around the world, including The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC), the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office, and Norway’s Datatilsynet, issued a joint statement regarding the unlawful data scraping. Key takeaways from their statement were that publically available PI is subject to privacy laws in majority jurisdictions, the obligation to protect such PI from data scraping on their websites belongs to social media companies and those who host publically accessible PI, and that incidents of mass data scarping can be considered data breaches in many jurisdictions. Read more

Meta faces $20 million fine in Australia

Onavo, an analytics company owned by Facebook, and Facebook itself are being fined $10 million each for their personal data usage of Australian users. More specifically, they failed to inform users of the VPN service and the extent of their personal data usage. User’s data, while it was anonymized, was highly detailed and had the potential of being linked back to the users. The data collected included information on each app being used and for how long it was being used by the users. Read more

Personal data and Health care data of 4 million leaked in Colorado data breach

Colorado Department of Health Care Policy & Financing (HCPF) suffered a massive breach that compromised personal data, health care data, and demographic data, including first and last names, social security numbers, Medicaid ID numbers, home addresses, income information, lab results, and more. According to HCPF, the breach occurred due to zero-day vulnerability on May 31st, which impacted the managed file transfer application utilized by their tech partner, IBM. Read more

TikTok to remain banned in the state of Montana

In response to TikTok’s appeal against the statewide ban of the app in Montana, stating that the ban violates the First Amendment, Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen stated that while the app gives people a platform to exercise free speech, the ban is warranted due to the negative impacts of “TikTok's data harvesting practices and ownership by a hostile foreign government.” Read more

Company fined for posting individual’s picture without consent

Spanish Data Protection Authority, AEPD imposed a fine of €20,000 on Joly Digital SLU as a journalist published a photo of an individual, without their consent, on a Joly Digital web page. The photo was taken from the individual’s private Instagram account, of which the journalist was not an approved follower. AEPD found that this action violated Article 6(1) of the GDPR. Read more