Data Privacy Happenings 📰
Hello from MineOS's monthly newsletter, The Privacy Mindset! 👋
2023 has just days left until it becomes a thing of the past, which means it's retrospective time!
To answer the question posed in the email subject line: yes, 2023 was a year privacy professionals will remember vividly, and mostly for the good.
Regulations passed? ✅
8 U.S. states passed comprehensive data privacy laws, with another 2 passing strong consumer health data laws. Now over 130 million Americans have data rights, with momentum surging for more gains in 2024.
In the EU, the Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act passed and became partially applicable, which should make regulating Big Tech an easier proposition going forward.
Elsewhere globally, India and Vietnam each passed data privacy laws, expanding the industry in the APAC region.
Strong enforcement? ✅
The EU did most of the heavy lifting here, putting forth the strongest year of GDPR enforcement in the law's existence so far.
GDPR fines set records for both the monetary amount as well as the quantity of fines issued:
🔻 438 GDPR fines
🔻 €2.054 Billion/$2.248 Billion in fines
Memorable narratives? ✅
We might be burying the lede by not starting with this, but 2023 will of course be remembered for the rise of AI and all the corresponding talk of AI governance and an increased emphasis on data privacy.
There's way too much to cover here, but the EU saw fit to put an exclamation on the topic for 2023 by agreeing on an official framework for the upcoming AI Act, the world's first comprehensive AI legislation.
The law's text and technical details have not yet been revealed and still have to be hammered out over the course of the next few months, but having an agreement in place will likely impact how AI is discussed in the first half of 2024.
Our initial takeaways from the announcement? The tiered approach works well, as different risk levels should carry different regulatory obligations rather than painting AI broadly with a single brush.
As the law will apply to EU citizens, much of the world is going to have to react and comply or lose out on the European market, which should create a similar type of global adoption that we saw when the GDPR went into effect in 2018.
There are still plenty of questions to answer when the full text comes out and many are upset with the regulation—with some claiming it will slow innovation and others worried it has not outright banned technology that could be used for state surveillance—but getting any kind of law on the books makes sure that the unchecked AI hysteria that dominated most of 2023 will not leak into 2024.
Regulation might not be ahead of AI, but it could conceivably keep pace with it, something that unfortunately cannot be said about data privacy regulation, considering regulators have spent much of the past decade playing catch-up.
For that, the 2023 narrative of AI and AI governance ends on a high note.
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