A group of 12 countries has just released a joint statement warning against the illegal bulk collection of personal data from social media platforms and other online sites, which are bound to protect their users’ information. The 12 countries affected are Australia, Canada, the UK, Hong Kong and Switzerland, whose respective data protection agencies were cited in the statement.
According to these organizations, data scraping, this way of scraping data with an automated tool, is increasingly used to collect large amounts of personal information on the Internet. This raises significant privacy concerns as this information can then be resold or used for identity theft.
Uptrend
According to the Australian Information Commissioner’s Office (OAIC), in recent years there has been an increase in reports of mass data mining from social media applications and other websites hosting personal information accessible to the public. audience. For example, he cited a case dating from 2020 involving the American facial recognition site Clearview AI.
We can also cite the case of the professional social network LinkedIn, victim of a severe data leak two years ago affecting 500 million users. A station F start-up had also been condemned in France a little less than two years ago for wild scraping, but on the basis of fraudulent access to an internal directory of a major Parisian business school.
The operators of social networks or of these sites hosting personal data accessible to the public nevertheless have the obligation, in particular with the general regulations on data protection, to “protect personal information on their platforms against the illegal scraping of data “, specifies the press release. The 12 countries said they expect to gather feedback “over the next few weeks” from social media operators on how they comply or plan to comply with the “expectations and principles” set out in this statement. common.
Good practices
This document was notably sent to YouTube (Alphabet), TikTok (ByteDance), Meta-owned platforms (Facebook and Threads), Weibo (Sina), X (formerly known as Twitter) and LinkedIn (Microsoft). The statement recalls practices to protect personal data against scraping and to mitigate its impact on privacy. For example, limiting the number of visits per hour or per day from a single account to other account profiles, or designating a specific team in charge of scraping detection are all good practices.
Given the risks posed by scraping, “controls should be regularly tested and updated to ensure they remain effective and adapt to changing technologies,” the group of twelve added. country. They also called on the operators of the sites concerned to collect and analyze data relating to scraping incidents in order to identify ways of improving their security.
Source: “ZDNet.com”