The privacy of people online is being put first by international data authorities.

Today, the privacy protection authorities of New Zealand, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, Switzerland, Norway, Columbia, Morocco, Argentina, Mexico and Jersey are issuing statements on data scraping, and how the public can protect their privacy.

The Office of the Privacy Commissioner (OPC) is part of that global effort to highlight the illegal scraping of personal information belonging to members of the public as well as the need for protections.

Privacy Commissioner Michael Webster says social media platforms and commercial websites must protect consumers from data scraping.

Data scraping, or web scraping, is a process where an entity hoovers up the data and uses it for their own purposes. It has become a key source of training data for generative AI (Artificial Intelligence) technologies, which in turn allow data scraping to happen at a faster rate, sometimes with malicious intent.

Social media companies and website hosts have obligations under the law to protect the personal information on their platforms from data scraping. Mass data scraping incidents that take personal information can constitute reportable data breaches in many jurisdictions.

"From a consumer perspective, people use online services as part of everyday life, and don’t expect their personal information to be hoovered up by other agencies, private or public, when they go online.

"From a privacy point of view, agencies collecting publicly available data need to understand that just because people are putting things out on the internet doesn’t mean that the Privacy Act’s safeguards don’t apply.

"Any platforms hosting or collecting data need to ask themselves what individuals would have expected in terms of the use of their data when they originally shared it, "says the Commissioner.

"I would also urge the public to consider that every time they use the internet, they are leaving digital footprints. If money can be made from those footprints, there’s every chance someone is going to take that opportunity."

The joint international statement from data protection authorities has also been sent directly to big tech companies such as Alphabet Inc, who own Google, Microsoft Corporation, who runs LinkedIn, and Sina Corp who run Weibo.

The capacity of data scraping technologies to collect and process vast amounts of individuals’ personal information from the internet raises significant privacy concerns, even when the information being scraped is publicly accessible anyway.

"And while not all AI is producing accurate work, it’s still producing work from the personal information it has collected. Inaccurate personal information about an identifiable individual is still personal information under the Privacy Act," says Mr Webster. The joint statement can be found here.

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