In stark contrast to U.S. norms, international privacy watchdogs have issued calls to social media behemoths to shield their users’ publicly available information from web-scraping, a widely-employed commercial practice in the United States. In other jurisdictions, this can be tantamount to a reportable data breach.
These concerns are echoed in Britain, particularly. “Social media companies have obligations under U.K. data protection law to protect the information people post on their platforms,” observed Stephen Bonner, who spearheads Britain’s prime privacy watchdog, the Information Commissioner’s Office. He added, “We are witnessing an uptick in reports of mass data-scraping from social media and we wish to remind organizations that such events may necessitate reporting to the ICO as a personal data breach.”
As an increasing number of privacy watchdogs chime in, it’s clear that the international community’s unease with AI data-scraping is creating a growing chasm with the U.S.
For a more detailed account, see the original report on Law.com.