Meta states in an SEC filing it is considering leaving Europe if it can no longer exchange data from European users with the United States, following the Schrems II decision. It's customary for regulatory filings to preemptively declare a wide variety of possible future hazards, and in that spirit a recently-filed Meta financial statement cites a ruling by the EU's Court of Justice (in July of 2020) voiding a U.S. law called the Privacy Shield (which Meta calls one legal basis for its current dara-transferring practices).

In the meantime Meta writes that it does not plan to withdraw from Europe.

Up until recently, the majority of digital identity systems have been federated, where a small group of “identity providers” supply individuals with a digital identity that can be used to access other websites and services within the federation. Now we’re seeing the shift to decentralized identity solutions and open ecosystems based on verifiable credentials, where anyone can participate, issue, and verify.

According to a recent study YouTube and TikTok track users' personal data more than any other social media apps. However, while YouTube mostly collects your personal data for its own purposes to serve you more relevant ads, TikTok mostly allows third-party trackers to collect your data -- "and from there, it's hard to say what happens with it," reports CNBC.

When Lou Montulli invented the cookie in 1994, he was a 23-year-old engineer at Netscape, the company that built one of the internet’s first widely used browsers. He was trying to solve a pressing problem on the early web: Websites had lousy memories. Every time a user loaded a new page, a website would treat them like a stranger it had never seen before. That made it impossible to build basic web features we take for granted today, like the shopping carts that follow us from page to page across e-commerce sites.

Within two years, advertisers learned ways to essentially hack cookies to do exactly what Montulli had tried to avoid: follow people around the internet. Eventually, they created the system of cookie-based ad targeting we have today. Twenty-seven years later, Montulli has some misgivings about how his invention has been used—but he has doubts about whether the alternatives will be any better.

A PhD thesis on (health) data ownership: It can be stated that digital information is irremovable part of modern healthcare. However, the legal ownership of patient information lacks a coherent and justified basis. The whole issue itself is actually bypassed by controlling patient information with different laws and regulations how patient information can be used and by whom. Nonetheless, the issue itself – who owns the patient information – is commonly missed or bypassed.

Use of Google Analytics has now been found to breach European Union privacy laws in France -- after a similar decision was reached in Austria last month. The French data protection watchdog, the CNIL, said today that an unnamed local website's use of Google Analytics is non-compliant with the bloc's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) -- breaching Article 44 which covers personal data transfers outside the bloc to so-called third countries which are not considered to have essentially equivalent privacy protections. The U.S. fails this critical equivalence test on account of having sweeping surveillance laws which do not provide non-U.S. citizens with any way to know whether their data is being acquired, how it's being used or to seek redress for any misuse.

A special set of editorials published in today's issue of the journal Science argue that social media in its current form may well be fundamentally broken for the purposes of presenting and disseminating facts and reason. The algorithms are running the show now, they argue, and the systems priorities are unfortunately backwards: "Rules of scientific discourse and the systematic, objective, and transparent evaluation of evidence are fundamentally at odds with the realities of debates in most online spaces." This produces what the authors call "homophilic self-sorting" -- the ones who are shown this content are the ones who are already familiar with it. In other words, they're preaching to the choir.