On April 2024 President Joe Biden of the United States signed an act which is now a law in the US, known as, “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act.”

On April 2024 President Joe Biden of the United States signed an act which is now a law in the US, known as, “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act.”

I found this to be very interesting as it covers my previous topics on data privacy as a key agenda for businesses in 2025. 

TikTok was founded by Zhang Yiming. He is also the founder of ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok. Zhang Yiming started ByteDance in 2012, and TikTok was officially launched in September 2016. 

Zhang's vision was to use artificial intelligence (AI) to revolutionize how users engage with content, leading to the creation of TikTok. His innovative approach has made TikTok one of the most popular social media platforms globally. 

Well, the act does not limit or disallow foreign ownership but focuses on “Adversaries” instead, as a move to control data privacy in America.  

Data breaches have the potential to impact hundreds of millions or even billions of people simultaneously in today's data-driven world. 

Attackers are taking advantage of the data dependencies of everyday life, which has led to an increase in data breaches as the amount of data moving has increased due to digital transformation. 

Future attacks' potential size is up in the air, but as the list of the largest data breaches of the twenty-first century shows, they have already grown to enormous proportions. 

According to CSO online that takes a look at some of the biggest data breaches. One, it was discovered in April 2019 that two Facebook app datasets had been made publicly available online. 

Phone numbers, account names, and Facebook IDs were among the details pertaining to over 530 million Facebook users from approximately 106 countries. 

But in April 2021, two years later, the data was made publicly available without charge in the black market. 

Before that there was another data breach on Facebook, one year prior to the US elections in 2015 by Cambridge Analytica. A total of about 50 million Facebook profiles that were hacked. 

Two, Sina Weibo is one of the biggest social media sites in China, with more than 600 million users. 

The company revealed in March 2020 that 538 million Weibo users' personal information, including real names, site usernames, gender, location, and phone numbers, had been compromised by an attacker who had gained access to a portion of its database. The database was reportedly then sold on the dark web by the attacker.  

Three, in June 2021, 700 million users' personal information was exposed on a dark web forum from the professional networking giant LinkedIn, affecting over 90 percent of its user base. 

After that, the hackers bragged that they were offering the entire 700 million customer database for sale. 

LinkedIn maintained that the incident was a breach of its terms of service rather than a data breach and that no private or sensitive information was revealed. 

To demonstrate the opposite, the hackers shared a sample of their scraped data, which included phone numbers, email addresses, genders, geolocation data, and other social media information.

Lastly, according to Cyber Daily Australia, On July 27, 2022, the social media giant, formerly known as Twitter, announced a significant hack in which information containing phone numbers and email addresses from a variety of accounts, including those belonging to celebrities and ordinary people, was taken. 

Utilizing Twitter's discoverability setting "Let others find you by phone number." Every account with a complete phone number for the entire French country code was impacted. 

After speaking with several individuals impacted, Habitu8 founder Loder stated that he had verified that the data in the purported breach, was accurate.  

Data breaches have indeed become a major concern in our digital age. These incidents highlight the importance of robust data protection measures and the need for continuous vigilance in the face of ever evolving cyber threats within businesses. 

What you can also deduce is that attackers sell your information on the dark web/black market so that other organizations/people can use them to direct their marketing towards you, extract money from your accounts, expose your private life to the public etc. 

One needs to be careful, aware and vigilant on what information you can put on your mobile devices, as well as with whom and the robust standards and practices on data privacy that you trust any institution with.

To be continued.

Alley Mtatya (pictured) is Advertising, Marketing, Branding and Customer Experience Expert based in Dar es Salaam