????Is data privacy ascendent? Or struggling

Since the passage of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in 2016, we have had many reasons to cheer the progress of data privacy. We see examples of lawmakers taking the issue more seriously, passing laws compelling companies to do the same. Meanwhile, consumers are growing more aware of their data’s importance, so they are more demanding that companies treat their data with respect, and will vote with their wallets. Underscoring all this proactive change is the threat of data breaches, which provides more impetus for everyone to improve their security and risk posture.?

But is data privacy as a concept, as a practice really on the upswing? A couple of stories from this month offered a conflicting narrative.?

On the positive side of the argument, it was interesting to read detailing how the advertising industry is responding to increasing data privacy measures .?

Thanks to privacy-by-design methods and privacy legislation, advertisers are struggling with “signal loss” (i.e. user data), resulting in more generic and less effective advertising. This is reshaping the industry, with new training, new departments, and a shift to first-party data.?

Adding to the narrative, recent moves made by the United States federal government and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) have targeted mass data collectors and made clear that to the executive, at least, "browsing and location data are sensitive, full stop” .?

Think of the children!

But on the other side of the ledger, let’s reflect on how normalized the process of collecting customer data has become.?

Amid all the drama surrounding the US House of Representatives passing a bill to force ByteDance to divest TikTok or face a ban , there was a detail that stuck out.?

Remember, lawmakers had several distinct arguments for the effort, including its potential effect on children, but the relevant one for us is that TikTok could make sensitive data available to the Chinese government.?

Leaving aside the fact that there are a lot of other ways that China already collects this data , let’s assume this is a real threat.?

TikTok collects an enormous amount of data on users, both to tune its advanced machine learning models and to bolster its advertising business. But no more so than other social media platforms, according to researchers. The question is whether the platform is governing this data appropriately. Again, you could ask the same question of Meta, Twitter/X, and any other social media platform.?

In discussing the ban, White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan had this to say : "Do we want the data from TikTok — children’s data, adults’ data — to be going — to be staying here in America or going to China?"?

It was interesting to hear this issue framed in this way, like the data collection must happen, the only questions are who does it and where the data goes. Yes, this was a throwaway line from someone who should know better, but I think it represents a common belief, and not one unique to the United States.??

While this mass data collection has been a part of our internet experience for decades, does it need to be??

Perhaps a better question than “who collects our children’s data?” would be, “Do we want companies to collect all this data in the first place, with such limited oversight?” And perhaps a better mechanism to address the issue in the US would be a federal privacy law.?

For those hoping for such a law, the proposal last week of a new bipartisan bill—the American Privacy Rights Act —will be welcome news, though early responses to the bill from lawmakers and privacy experts have been mixed . Will this be the one that sticks??

Because it's clear that while progress has been made in data privacy, our embedded attitudes towards data collection are holding us back.?

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