Hello and welcome to Eye on A.I. This past week, 12 data protection watchdogs from around the globe came together to issue a joint statement addressing data scraping and its effects on privacy.
The statement—signed by privacy officials from Australia, Canada, Mexico, China, Switzerland, Columbia, Argentina, and the U.K., to name a few—takes aim at website operators, specifically social media companies, and states they have obligations under data protection and privacy laws to protect information on their platforms from unlawful data scraping. Even publicly accessible personal information is subject to these laws in most jurisdictions, asserts the statement. Notably, the statement also outlines that data scraping incidents that harvest personal information can constitute reportable data breaches in many jurisdictions.
