By Byron V. Acohido

Could we be on the verge of Privacy Destruction 2.0, thanks to GenAI?

That’s a question that spilled out of a thought-provoking conversation I had with Pedro Fortuna, co-founder and CTO of Jscrambler, at RSAC 2024.

Jscrambler provides granular visibility and monitoring of JavaScript coding thus enabling companies to set and enforce security rules and privacy policies. For instance, it helps online tax services prevent leakage of taxpayers’ personal information via pixels, those imperceptible JavaScripts embedded in a web page to collect information about the user’s interactions.

It turns out, Fortuna observed, that GenAI/LLM is perfectly suited to the deeper mining of personal data collected by pixels as well as other JavaScript mechanisms currently in wide use.

This brought to mind 2010, the year I wrote news stories for USA TODAY about Mark Zuckerberg declaring privacy was “no longer a social norm” and Google CEO Eric Schmidt admitting that Google’s privacy policy was to “get right up to the creepy line and not cross it.”

Today, the temptation for companies to leverage GenAI/LLM just to get ahead of the competition is intense; and the stage is set for them to trample what remains of privacy protection in the post Zuckerberg/Schmidt era.

Jscrambler can at least provide technology to monitor and control how third-party JavaScript components handle private data. But at the end of the day, company leaders must be compelled to avail themselves of such tools and make privacy protection a priority.

For his part, Fortuna told me he is concerned that his two young children might become accustomed to relinquishing their privacy to unscrupulous data collectors; but he’s also optimistic that guardrails will emerge. For a full drill down, please give the  a listen.

Acohido

Pulitzer Prize-winning business journalist Byron V. Acohido is dedicated to fostering public awareness about how to make the Internet as private and secure as it ought to be.

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(LW provides consulting services to the vendors we cover.)

June 10th, 2024