Rabat – Morocco’s National Commission for the Control and Protection of Personal Data (CNDP) and 11 other personal data protection authorities around the world addressed this week an open letter to global tech giants to address privacy and data safety concerns.
Released on Thursday night, the letter was addressed to a few tech giants who oversee online services and social media sites.
These include Alphabet (parent company of Google and Youtube), Meta (Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp), Microsoft (Windows and LinkedIn), ByteDance (TikTok), X, and Sina Corp (Weibo).
In their letter, the data protection agencies urged the firms in question to stay alert on the main privacy risks associated with data scraping attacks, and encouraged social media and other sites to protect users’ personal data and comply with regulations.
The authorities also called on the companies to put measures in place to minimize the privacy risks associated with data scraping, and set out expectations for their compliance with data protection laws in force worldwide.
Data scraping refers to a process by which a computer program automatically extracts data from the web.
While data scraping technologies can be used for academic or harmless data gathering, they can also be used to collect personal data about social media users, which is seen by many as a breach of privacy.
Alongside Morocco’s CNDP, authorities from Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, Switzerland, Norway, New Zealand, Colombia, Jersey, Argentina, and Mexico all co-signed on the letter.
Despite announcing a transformation into a service-oriented institution earlier this year, the CNDP continues to fight for the protection of personal and private data of Moroccan citizens.
Earlier this year, the commission announced that visa service provider TLS Contact had violated laws around the handling of personal data.
