“Driven by everything from the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandals, to social media-driven fake news concerns, consumers and legislators are starting to push back on the goose that laid the golden digital egg,” Bob O’Donnell writes for Tech.pinions. “There’s growing awareness of the incredible power and influence that tech companies have on nearly every aspect of our lives, and alarm bells are growing louder.”
“The most recent evidence was the swift and unanimous passage of the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (officially labeled AB 375), a wide-ranging piece of legislation that was approved in late June by the CA State Senate and Assembly and signed into law by Governor Jerry Brown,” O’Donnell writes. “Conceptually similar to the recently instituted GDPR data privacy regulations of the European Union, the new law gives California-based consumers the right to know about all data being collected on them, the right to refuse sale of that data, the right to delete that data, and much more. As with GDPR, companies that don’t comply are potentially subject to large fines.”
“In comment after comment posted in response to online articles that covered the news of the legislation’s passage, there was/is a deep sense of betrayal and mistrust directed towards many large tech companies, such as Facebook and Google,” O’Donnell writes. “The combination of all the various data privacy and security scandals seems to have reached a tipping point, and consumers are both starting to demand more control over their personal data and expect more accountability from companies who collect it.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Privacy and control of personal data is very, very bad for the likes of Google and Facebook and that’s a very, very good thing for everyone else, including Apple Inc.
SEE ALSO:
U.S. House Republicans demand answers from Apple, Google on privacy, data practices – July 9, 2018
California lawmakers approve data-privacy bill despite opposition from Google, Facebook, advertisers – June 29, 2018
Apple highlights user privacy as Facebook exec steps down – June 14, 2018