"These incidents involve the intentional use of deceptive or illegal practices to fraudulently obtain money, assets, or information from individuals or institutions, and include actions carried out over cyber channels."
Global Privacy Control is a browser-level signal that allows users to express-prior to any interaction with a website-their decision to opt out of the sale or sharing of their personal data. To meet these evolving legal requirements, Axeptio now integrates GPC signal detection and processing through a new feature available for projects using a CCPA banner, a prerequisite for remaining compliant in the United States.
As Theresa Defino recently reported, HHS OCR will prioritize risk assessments and expand its investigations into risk management in 2026. Alisa Chestler and Layna Cook Rush of Baker Donelson have summarized some recent recommendations from HHS OCR's January 2026 Cybersecurity Newsletter that regulated entities may want to pay increased attention to at this point: Patching Is a Required Risk Management Activity Legacy Systems and Unpatchable Vulnerabilities Are Not Excuses Unnecessary Software and Default Accounts Create Hidden Risk
There is a growing emphasis on database compliance today due to the stricter enforcement of compliance rules and regulations to safeguard user privacy. For example, GDPR fines can reach £17.5 million or 4% of annual global turnover (the higher of the two applies). Besides the direct monetary implications, companies also need to prioritize compliance to protect their brand reputation and achieve growth.
Traditional IAM and IGA systems are designed primarily for human users and depend on manual onboarding and integration for each application - connectors, schema mapping, entitlement catalogs, and role modeling. Many applications never make it that far. Meanwhile, non-human identities (NHIs): service accounts, bots, APIs, and agent-AI processes are natively ungoverned, operating outside standard IAM frameworks and often without ownership, visibility, or lifecycle controls.
There's been an explosion in the growth of corporate eLearning initiatives in the post-COVID era. That's due in part to the growth in remote work and geographically distributed teams. Unfortunately, there are always growing pains when any corporate initiative scales up in a hurry. In the case of eLearning, one of those growing pains is a tendency to let data privacy standards fall by the wayside.
Ad fraud isn't just a marketing problem anymore - it's a full-scale threat to the trust that powers the digital economy. In 2024 alone, fraud in mobile advertising jumped 21%, while programmatic ad fraud drained nearly $50 billion from the industry. During data privacy week 2026, these numbers serve as a reminder that ad fraud is not only about wasted budgets - it's also about how consumer data moves, gets tracked, and sometimes misused across complex ecosystems.
How do privacy regulators decide which companies to poke? Often, it's a consumer complaint. Other times, it's a headline. And, sometimes, it's just personal. Regulators are consumers, too, after all. But it's important to remember that every brush with a regulator doesn't turn into a full-blown case, said privacy attorney Tyler Bridegan. Bridegan spent nearly two years as director of privacy and tech enforcement for the Texas attorney general's office. He left government work and returned to private practice in October as a partner at Womble Bond Dickinson.