Top News – Google reaches settlement over user tracking; India’s privacy regulation draft rules to be released and more
Digital Personal Data Protection Act draft rules to be released in January 2024
The Indian Government plans to release the draft rules for the country’s data protection regulation; the Digital Personal Data Protection Act in January 2024. The announcement was made during a consultation meeting on the 20th of December 2023 by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology. The industry can provide feedback to the draft rules for a duration of 1 week after the release. However, due to the holiday season, US based companies have reportedly requested for the consultation period to be extended. Read more
$300,000 penalty imposed on NY hospital over health data tracking practices
In late December, the New York Attorney General reached a settlement of $300,000 with NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital for violating HIPAA, the Executive Law and the General Business Law. It was found that the hospital website had deployed multiple third-party tools to serve targeted ads, which were used to share user data with third parties, including health data. The AG’s investigation found that the hospital did not have an agreement with third parties to limit the use of health data, did not have viable procedures for verifying third party tracking tools and did not review the tools for policy violations before they were deployed. Read more
Utah considers sharing student data from school districts
The Utah Board of Education (USBE) is considering a policy that would force school districts to share student data with charter schools. This would be done to help charter schools advertise directly to families. The data shared would include addresses and phone numbers. However, the USBE director of privacy noted that should the policy be enacted, then parents would have the right to opt-out of their childrens data being shared. Read more
$5 billion settlement reached by Google for secretly tracked users via incognito mode
The on-going lawsuit, filed in 2020 in the U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, sees a scheduled trial date for Feb 5th 2024 after the lawyers of Google and for consumers stated they reached a preliminary settlement. It was alleged that Google’s analytics, cookies and apps let Alphabet, the parent company, track users activity even when they were on “Incognito” mode, collecting large amounts of data. When filed in 2020, the lawsuit sought at least $5000 in damages per user for privacy law violations. Read more
