3 Interesting Articles

Twitter’s CISO Takes Off, Leaving Security an Open Question

Dark Reading: Twitter’s former CISO, Lea Kissner, recently resigned along with two other high-ranking executives. Elon Musk’s tumultuous takeover is putting the platform’s security at high risk and could have serious ramifications for the public. The company’s most immediate concern is complying with the FTC. An FTC spokesperson said, “We are tracking recent developments at Twitter with deep concern. No CEO or company is above the law, and companies must follow our consent decrees.” The agency fined Twitter $150 million in May 2022 for violating the terms of a 2011 consent decree involving deceptively collecting data for ad targeting. 

More: TechCrunch | Politico

Google to pay record $391m privacy settlement

BBC News: The technology giant will pay almost $400 million to 40 states for secretly tracking users who opted out of location services on their devices. This is the largest privacy-related settlement in the US and attorney generals from multiple states have stated that Google has been misleading consumers since at least 2014 about location tracking. There’s one outstanding case on a similar topic after Indiana, Washington, Texas, and D.C. took legal action against them in January. More to come. 

Twitter Called to Meet EU Data Watchdog Over Privacy Concerns

Bloomberg: We can’t stop talking about Twitter but this time we’re focusing on Europe. The company is supposedly no longer meeting criteria that a data protection employee is available to make decisions from their Ireland office. Twitter will meet with the EU data protection inspector in the coming weeks to discuss these concerns. GDPR privacy regulators have the authority to penalize companies as much as 4% of annual sales for data privacy violations which could mean serious penalties for Twitter.  

2 Stats You Should Know

79% of Americans are concerned about how companies use their data (source) 

A total of 108.9 million accounts were breached in the third quarter of 2022, a 70% increase compared to the previous quarter. (source)

1 More Thing

Last week we asked our audience a simple question: Do you agree or disagree that most CISO organizations are underfunded? Well, the results are in and it’s no surprise (maybe there’s a little selection bias with our readership).