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Max Schrems’ organization is the first to combine both: They have the funds and they have the reach.
— Stephan Zimprich, partner at Fieldfisher law firm
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Happy Thursday! And welcome to our final Snippets of 2024 🎊 This week, at the intersection of privacy and tech, we're covering:
- Privacy advocacy group NOYB's newly unlocked ability to pursue class actions in the EU
- An Axios examination of Apple's AI privacy claims
- The European Data Protection Board's latest guidelines on how AI developers can remain compliant
- And so much more!
P.S. With the upcoming holiday season, Snippets will be on break for the next two weeks—returning on Thursday, January 9, 2025. |
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NOYB empowered to bring class actions in the EU
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Photographer: Alex Kraus/Bloomberg
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NOYB, an Austrian privacy advocacy group led by Max Schrems, has gained "qualified entity" status in Austria and Ireland, enabling it to bring collective legal actions against companies violating data privacy laws, including the GDPR.
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- As a qualified entity, NOYB can now represent consumers in collective court actions across the EU under the 2020 Representative Actions Directive.
- The organization is empowered to seek both monetary damages and injunctions against unlawful data practices, such as tracking without consent or improper data transfers.
- The move is likely to ramp up litigation efforts against US tech companies, like LinkedIn, Meta, and Uber, which already faced a collective $760 million in fines from EU regulators in 2024.
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🎁 Celebrate our customers impact with Data Rights Unwrapped 2024!
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Launched in 2023, it was immediately clear that Data Rights Unwrapped was an incredible way to highlight the tangible impact our customers are making in the privacy space.
This year, we keep the party going—shining a spotlight on how our customers achieved even greater impact in 2024, using Transcend’s next-generation privacy solutions to achieve remarkable outcomes.
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Examining Apple’s AI privacy claims
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Illustration: Maura Losch/Axios
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Apple Intelligence leverages personal data for highly personalized AI services, but promises to protect privacy by ensuring data isn’t used to train Apple's AI models. Axios examines these claims.
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- According to Axios, Apple Intelligence does use personal data from contacts, mail, and apps to deliver personalized services, but does not store or use that data to train its AI models.
- Though the recently added ChatGPT integration is optional and built to obscure users' IP addresses, people using ChatGPT Plus will have to consent to OpenAI’s privacy policies.
- While most AI systems refrain from generating images of kids or specific individuals, Apple goes against this norm in order to provide more personalization—a strategy that could create both a competitive advantage and trust issues.
- Ultimately, the company does tick major privacy boxes, notably with its use of on-device processing, Private Cloud Compute, and weekly reports showing users how their data has been used.
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EU regulator weighs in on AI legal issues
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Image Credits:Didem Mente/Anadolu Agency / Getty Images
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The European Data Protection Board (EDPB) issued an opinion outlining how AI developers can use personal data to build and deploy large language models (LLMs) while staying compliant with EU privacy laws.
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- The opinion covers key issues including whether AI models can be considered anonymous and if "legitimate interest" can be used as a legal basis for processing personal data in AI development.
- It also offers guidelines on how regulators should handle AI models developed with unlawfully processed data.
- The release emphasizes that each AI model must undergo case-by-case assessments—with the possibility of applying measures such as anonymization to ensure GDPR compliance.
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- Meta agrees to a $50 million settlement in Australia.
- How data brokers are affected by California’s latest measures.
- 22 states and DC oppose Clearview AI’s privacy settlement.
- Opinion: Australia’s social media ban for minors won't help.
- Meta receives a €251 million fine for 2018 data breach.
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TikTok CEO meets with Trump as US ban deadline approaches
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Reuters
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On Monday, President-elect Donald Trump met TikTok CEO, Shou Zi Chew, as the social media giant fights a law that will ban TikTok in the US unless its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, sells the platform before January 19.
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- Trump, who favored a ban during his first term, has since reversed his stance as a ban could give more market power to Facebook, which he claims contributed to his 2020 election defeat.
- With Trump set to be inaugurated on January 20, a day after the sale deadline, TikTok filed an emergency request with the US Supreme Court, asking for a brief delay to allow the incoming administration time to review the issue.
- At a press conference on Monday, Trump said he had a "warm spot" in his heart for TikTok, which he believes helped draw younger voters to his side.
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Exploring Clio, Anthropic’s AI analysis tool
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AI developer Anthropic released a paper outlining the technical aspects of Clio, an analysis tool meant to gain insights into real-world AI usage, while maintaining user privacy.
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- Clio uses an automated, multi-stage process to analyze conversation data—extracting metadata, grouping conversations into topic clusters, and presenting high-level insights without exposing personal data.
- Clio supports safety improvements by detecting patterns of misuse, identifying false positives/negatives in classifiers, and monitoring during high-stakes events like elections.
- Though Clio raises ethical concerns around potential misuse and false positives, Anthropic claims strict access controls and continuous audits will mitigate these risks.
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Transcend partners with Microsoft to bring seamless data governance to the enterprise
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We're thrilled to announce our collaboration with Microsoft through their Pegasus Program, an invite-only initiative that brings enterprise-ready technology to the Microsoft ecosystem.
Through this partnership, Transcend and Microsoft are making it easier for businesses to integrate Transcend's platform into their Microsoft environment, allowing them to automatically carry out technical privacy operations.
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Snippets is delivered to your inbox every Thursday morning by Transcend. We're the platform that helps companies put privacy on autopilot by making it easy to encode privacy across an entire tech stack. Learn more.
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