Most of us seem to be unaware of just how much data we post on social media gets collected, stored, and analyzed by software and specialists and ultimately used on us. Sometimes, this is in the form of ads and various marketing tactics; in other cases, it is used as a means for behavioral and psychological analysis. 

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The easiness at which digital data from young users can be collected has recently come to light in two court lawsuits that were submitted, with Meta and Twitter on one side and Bright Data – an Israeli company for data collection that is active on the global market – on the other side. 

The lawsuits and countersuit deal with whether privacy concerns were not fully addressed. Bright Data – whose clients include various United Nations agencies, international NGOs, and governments – is one of the companies that knows how to use the data we share on social media. Meta was also in this business, until recently.

In January 2023, Meta asked Bright Data to stop scraping data from its platforms, noting that it was repeatedly being fined by the EU for violating privacy laws. When Bright Data refused, Meta decided to sue the company, ostensibly over trade issues but implicitly over alleged privacy violations for its users. According to the lawsuit, as early as April 2021, Bright Data was running an operation for scraping data from various Meta-owned platforms, including Facebook and Instagram, allegedly circumventing the terms of service. 

Moreover, Meta said that the Israel company put on sale databases it collected from the various sites and platforms and that it was selling its technology to third parties so that they, too, could scrape data from Meta platforms and thus circumvent the various restrictions that have been placed to protect users' privacy. 

Video: Musk speaks on changes at Twitter / Reuters

X, formerly known as Twitter, also sued Bright Data, claiming that the business intelligence  "scrapes and sells millions of records from X Corp.'s X platform, in blatant violation of X Corp.'s Terms of Service, by which Bright Data is bound" and that it "induces and facilitates other X users to violate their own agreements with X Corp. by selling automated data-scraping tools and services that specifically target a wide range of X Corp. data."

Bright Data countersued. In a conversation with Israel Hayom, the company said the following: 

"Twitter and Meta are attempting to block public information on the web, which is freely accessible and does not sit behind a log in. Scraping public data is legal, important for humanity, and is crucial to all business operations that exist on the web. Its legality has been reaffirmed by courts that it is part of the public domain, which is why the lawsuit is over breach of contract. It is important to take note that if Bright Data did not have a business profile page on those platforms, there would be no lawsuits."

It also added the following explanation of how events unfolded: 

"The beginning of the affair in January of this year, when the company Meta contacted Bright Data demanding that it stop harvesting data from its platforms, this against the background of the repeated fines of the European Union against it for violating the privacy laws of the citizens of the Union. " This makes it sound like Bright Data was fined.

"Meta decided to sue the company, allegedly due to commercial issues but also due to the violation of the privacy of its users." -The lawsuit is clear, this has nothing to do with the privacy of the users. The lawsuit is not based on the privacy of users so this is factually incorrect."

Meanwhile, class action was initiated against the company in Israel, alleging that it was scraping users' data and selling it. It claims that this includes minors. Attorney Lior Lahav, who represents some of the Israeli plaintiffs, told Israel Hayom that Bright Data's actions have been made possible in part because of lacking consumer protection regulation in Israel. 

According to Lahav, the "regulators in Israel largely shy away from action, and this is very clear. They do not manage the whole issue of data protection and do not impose fines on companies that violate the law. The truth of the matter is that we lag behind the rest of the world by a sizeable margin. Just look at the fines on Google and Facebook in Europe on a monthly basis. Regulation in Israel hasn't really been successful in protecting citizens." 

Youths, who share almost everything on social media, suffer greatly from privacy violations. This realization has led to strict demands when it comes to collecting data and to the introduction of guardrails online. Governments and businesses have begun requiring social media to set strict age restrictions for entering their platforms. 

Dr. Liraz Margalit is a social psychologist who specializes in behavioral design and decision making in the digital age. She is also a witness on behalf of the plaintiffs. She says that "because of the effects of the social media, we don't even think about who is looking at our information or what that person does with it later. We just seek gratification from sharing it, and it makes us feel special."

She added, "This is a very big danger. Parents share information on their children from when they are about three years old. They not only let companies such as Bright Data collect information on them, they also make it easier for hackers to steal their identity. This is perhaps an extreme scenario, but today we can learn things about people as soon as they are born. Moreover, we have to take into account that for most people, the brain is fully developed only at 25, and therefore until then, young people can be much more easily exposed to outside influence from marketers and advertisers, as well as news and current events. Collecting information on young users brings us to a situation in which we have the real danger of shaping the children's personalities by corporations, trading companies, and even hostile entities."

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The Israeli tech company NSO Group on Sunday filed a libel lawsuit against an Israeli newspaper after it published a series of explosive articles claiming Israeli police unlawfully used its spyware on dozens of public figures.

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The articles by the Israeli business newspaper Calcalist published over recent weeks triggered an uproar over what the newspaper claimed was the police's unfettered use of sophisticated phone hacking software on a broad swath of figures. An investigation into the reports, which were unsourced, found no indication of abuse.

The NSO suit targets a specific article published earlier this month, which said the company allowed clients to delete traces of their use of the spyware, a claim it denies. But the company, which has faced a growing backlash over its product, questioned the overall credibility of the reports, calling the series of articles "one-sided, biased and false."

"The thorough investigation that was carried out pulls the rug out from under another attempt to discredit the company and its workers and serves as additional proof that not every journalistic investigation with a sensational headline about NSO is indeed based on facts," the company said in a statement.

NSO was asking for 1 million shekels ($310,000) in damages that it said would be donated to charity.

The Calcalist reports said police spied on politicians, protesters and even members of former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's inner circle, including one of his sons. The paper said police used Pegasus, the controversial spyware program developed by NSO, without obtaining a court warrant.

The investigation led by Israel's deputy attorney general found no evidence to support the claims, although the journalist, Tomer Ganon, has stood by his work. The investigation's findings were a rare piece of good news for NSO, which has faced mounting criticism over the spyware.

Pegasus is a powerful tool that allows its operator to infiltrate a target's phone and sweep up its contents, including messages, contacts and location history.

NSO has been linked to snooping on human rights activists, journalists and politicians in countries ranging from Saudi Arabia to Poland to Mexico to the United Arab Emirates. In November, the US Commerce Department blacklisted the company, saying its tools had been used to "conduct transnational repression."

NSO says it sells the product only to government entities to fight crime and terrorism, with all sales regulated by the Israeli government.

The company does not identify its clients and says it has no knowledge of who is targeted. Although it says it has safeguards in place to prevent abuse, it says it ultimately does not control how its clients use the software.

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The State Comptroller has opened an investigation into the alleged use of sophisticated spyware on Israeli citizens by law enforcement agencies following a report by financial newspaper Calcalist.

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The State Comptroller's office said it "places special emphasis on protecting the privacy of Israeli citizens and residents. The technological means serve as evidence in criminal proceedings and raise questions as to the balance between their usefulness and the violation of the right to privacy and additional freedoms. These means also pose risks of leaking personal information and the misuse of databases. As a result, State Comptroller Matanyahu Englman decided to include in the long-established office work plan the issue of law enforcement agencies' use of technologies for enforcement purposes."

According to the Calcalist report, police used the NSO spyware Pegasus to surveil leaders of protests against Opposition Leader Benjamin Netanyahu in 2020, who was then prime minister. It said police also hacked the phones of two sitting mayors suspected of corruption and numerous other Israeli citizens, all without a court order or a judge's oversight.

The Israel Police denied the allegations, saying they operate according to the law, and the NSO Group said it does not identify its clients.

The company says its products are intended to be used against criminals and terrorists, and that it does not control how its clients use the software. Israel, which regulates the company, has not said whether its own security forces use the spyware.

The report, which cited no current or formal officials from the government, police or NSO corroborating the paper's claims, referred to eight alleged examples of the police's secretive signal intelligence unit employing Pegasus to surveil Israeli citizens, including hacking phones of a murder suspect and opponents of the Jerusalem Pride Parade. The report did not name any of the people whose phones were allegedly hacked by the police.

"In all the cases mentioned in the article, and in other instances, use of Pegasus was made at the sole discretion of senior police officers," the report said. "The significance is that with Pegasus, the police can effectively hack without asking a court, without a search or entry warrant, without oversight, to all cell phones."

The Privacy Protection Authority said it was concerned by reports that the Israel Police was allegedly using the Pegasus program to monitor Israeli citizens and had contacted Israel Police Commissioner Yaakov Shabtai to "examine the repercussions of the use of the program for citizens' personal information."

The authority emphasized "that to the extent that the police use the Pegasus software to monitor Israeli citizens, this is a serious violation of the privacy of the citizens on whom the surveillance is carried out." 

Refraining from commenting specifically on the Calcalist report, the authority said, "The use of technological systems for monitoring citizens, including within the framework of the war on crime, is a mechanism that inevitably includes a serious violation of citizens' privacy, and implies a violation of the autonomy of each and every one of us, an individual's ability to exercise their full rights, and the democratic nature of Israeli society." It noted "an urgent meeting was requested with the police commissioner and at the same time, for the police to respond to the authority's request for clarifications on the matter. "

The report sparked an outcry across Israel's political spectrum.

Energy Minister Karine Elharrar told Army Radio that such surveillance "was something that a democratic country cannot allow."

Likud MK Yuval Steinitz said that surveillance of citizens by law enforcement without judicial oversight is improper and that if the claims are correct, it should be investigated.

Public Security Minister Omer Barlev, whose department oversees the police, tweeted that he would verify that police received explicit authorization from a judge to use the spyware.

Shas has called on the Knesset speaker to launch a parliamentary investigation. Yesh Atid MK Merav Ben Ari, who heads the Knesset's public security committee, said the panel would hold a hearing into the report's claims.

The Israel Police issued a statement after the report's publication, saying that "there's no truth to the claims raised in the article" and that "all police operations in this field are in accordance with the law, in line with court orders and meticulous protocols."

Senior police officials asked for any evidence of illegal wiretapping to be handed over to the police. They noted the Israel Police's National Cyber Crime Unit "was established in light of the need to fight major crime in the digital era, to prevent murders, car explosions, and public vandalism, among other things solely in accordance with the law." 

They emphasized that on the issue of wire-tapping, "We operate with internal oversight, from the issuance of an order, its implementation, through providing a report to the [police] commissioner, and all this in an orderly report to the Knesset and the Law and Justice Committee."

The police do not wire-tap protesters, they said, noting, "We only use [such] tools to combat crime. The activity is not used on normative citizens. These are regulated tools that receive the relevant legal authorizations before they are brought into service. You cannot contend with crime by relying on tools from 1948. And we therefore need advanced technology.

Likud MK Amir Ohana, who was public security minister during the protests, said he had no knowledge of the reported surveillance.

The Black Flag protest movement, whose leaders were allegedly surveilled during weekly demonstrations in recent years calling on Netanyahu to resign, called on the police to release the names of the people whose phones were hacked. Spokesman Roee Neuman said the protest leaders only learned of the digital surveillance following the publication of the report.

Pegasus software surreptitiously grants full access to a person's cellphone, including real-time communications.

Tuesday's report was the latest blow for the company, which has faced growing scrutiny and criticism for its software's use by repressive governments.

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Poland's most powerful politician has acknowledged that the country bought advanced spyware from the Israeli surveillance software maker NSO Group, but denied that it was being used to target his political opponents.

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Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the leader of Poland's ruling conservative party, Law and Justice, said in an interview that the software, Pegasus, is now being used by secret services in many countries to combat crime and corruption. He noted that Pegasus represents a technological advancement over earlier monitoring systems, which did not allow the services to monitor encrypted messages.

"It would be bad if the Polish services did not have this type of tool," Kaczynski said in an interview to be published in the Monday edition of the weekly Sieci, excerpts of which were published Friday by the wPolityce.pl news portal.

The interview follows exclusive reports by The Associated Press that Citizen Lab, a cyber watchdog group at the University of Toronto, found that three Polish government critics were hacked with NSO's Pegasus spyware.

On Thursday, Amnesty International independently verified the finding by Citizen Lab that Sen. Krzysztof Brejza had been hacked multiple times in 2019 when he was running the opposition's parliamentary election campaign. Text messages stolen from Brejza's phone were doctored and aired by state-controlled TV as part of a smear campaign in the heat of the race, which the populist ruling party went on to narrowly win.

Brejza now maintains that the election was not fair since the ruling party would have had access to his campaign's tactical thinking and plans.

The revelations have rocked Poland, drawing comparisons to the 1970s Watergate scandal in the United States and eliciting calls for an investigative commission in parliament.

Kaczynski said he sees no reason to set up such a commission, and he denied that the surveillance played any role in the outcome of the 2019 elections.

"There is nothing here, no fact, except the hysteria of the opposition. There is no Pegasus case, no surveillance," Kaczynski said. "No Pegasus, no services, no secretly obtained information played any role in the 2019 election campaign. They lost because they lost. They shouldn't look for such excuses today."

The other two Polish targets confirmed by Citizen Lab were Roman Giertych, a lawyer who represents opposition politicians in a number of politically sensitive cases, and Ewa Wrzosek, an independent-minded prosecutor.

Kaczynski's allies had previously denied that Poland purchased and used Pegasus.

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Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki called the Citizen Lab-AP findings "fake news" and suggested a foreign intelligence service could have done the spying – an idea dismissed by critics who said no other government would have any interest in the three Polish targets.

Deputy Defense Minister Wojciech Skurkiewicz in late December said "the Pegasus system is not in the possession of the Polish services. It is not used to track or surveil anyone in our country."

Media reports say Poland purchased Pegasus in 2017, using money from the so-called Justice Fund, which is meant to help the victims of crimes and rehabilitate criminals. According to investigations by the TVN broadcaster and Gazeta Wyborcza daily, it is used by the Central Anti-Corruption Bureau, a special service created to combat corruption in public life that is under the political control of the ruling party.

"The public money was spent on an important public purpose, related to the fight against crime and the protection of citizens," Kaczynski said.

Dozens of high-profile cases of Pegasus abuse have been uncovered since 2015, many by a global media consortium last year, with the NSO Group malware employed to eavesdrop on journalists, politicians, diplomats, lawyers and human rights activists from the Middle East to Mexico.

The Polish hacks are considered particularly egregious because they occurred not in a repressive autocracy but in a European Union member state.

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Last week, Israel Hayom revealed that the ministry intended to probe the claims circulating about NSO's conduct. The report said that the team entrusted with looking into the reports would include representatives of the Defense Ministry, the National Security Council, the Mossad, and other officials. The team is charged with clarifying whether or not NSO Group operated in accordance with the terms of its defense export permit, which it received from the Defense Ministry's Defense Exports Control Agency (DECA), and whether or not the company's products have been used in ways that violate the terms of the permit.

The decision to launch a probe into the affair was made following the sensation caused by reports in 17 international media outlets, including the Washington Post and the Guardian, which were based on a leaked document that the reports said included 50,000 cellphone numbers that various governments had asked to track using NSO's Pegasus software.

The authors of the expose claimed that in 37 cases that had been checked, Pegasus had been used to crack or try to crack the devices of political officials, elected officials, journalists, and human rights activists. The report also claimed that a few national leaders, including French President Emmanuel Macron, had been targeted for tracking.

Unsurprisingly, the report sparked massive backlash against NSO. France's chief prosecutor announced that he had launched an investigation into the matter after the site Mediapart claimed that two of its reporters had been the targets of Morocco's security services, which had supposedly employed the Pegasus software. Meanwhile, the Indian new site The Wire said that the government had asked to track the cellphone of opposition leader Rahul Gandhi.

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An Israeli short film about a pizza order that goes very, very wrong has been awarded a humanitarian prize.

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Oshri Cohen's NEW WORLD (pizza) ORDER, produced by Haven Originals, was named on Tuesday for the Award of Distinction Humanitarian Award at the Accolade Global Film Competition.

In the movie, the protagonist is an Average Joe who simply wants to order a pizza through his smart speaker. Hungry and in a hurry, he gives into the temptation to accept new terms and conditions that allow the use of his personal information in order to make the order process frictionless. This leads him to the terrifying realization that "they" know way too much, and the pizza lover finds himself being violently interrogated by government officials, in his own living room.

Cohen's short is part of Project Out, a series of short films that focus on the "little guy" versus the government or big tech. Each film tells the story of a different character in a different world of rules and a constant conflict and looks at the question of how far people should go to remain good, law-abiding citizens.

Haven Originals co-founder Ronen Menipaz said, "We're thrilled to receive this award. Haven Originals, our concept development production house, focuses on the production of content with the goal of encouraging critical thinking and breaking paradigms. We're very proud of this project and see this award as a testament that our efforts are echoing."

The goal of the Humanitarian Award is to honor filmmakers who bring awareness to ecological, political, social justice, health and wellness, animal welfare, and conservation issues, through excellence in filmmaking.

Thus far, the Project Out films have won 12 global awards. The Hollywood Just4Shorts film and screenplay competition picked one of its entries to honor with the best web series award, and another short was an official selection at the New York Liftoff Film Festival for 2020.

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France Digitale will file a complaint against iPhone maker Apple with data privacy watchdog CNIL on Tuesday over alleged breaches of European Union rules, France's leading startup lobby said in a statement.

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The lobby alleges iOS 14 software does not comply with EU privacy requirements, which mandate that organizations must ask visitors online if they agree to have some of their data collected via trackers or other tools.

France Digitale argues that iPhone owners are asked whether they are ready to allow installed mobile apps to gather a key identifier used to define campaign ads and send targeted ads, but that Apple's default settings allow the US firm to carry its own targeted ad campaigns without clearly asking iPhone users for their prior consent.

Apple issued a written response to the allegations: "The allegations in the complaint are patently false and will be seen for what they are, a poor attempt by those who track users to distract from their own actions and mislead regulators and policymakers."

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​The Knesset on Wednesday adopted an amendment to the Public Health Ordinance that allows the disclosure of information on non-vaccinated Israelis to relevant municipal health officials.

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The legislation, which will be in place for three months or until the coronavirus-related state emergency ends, aims to encourage the public to get vaccinated. The bill passed its third and final reading by a vote of 30-13.

The bill grants the Health Ministry permission to share the names, ID numbers, addresses, and phone numbers of Israelis who have yet to be inoculated or have missed their second dose with high-ranking officials in the Education Ministry, as well as with officials in the Labor, Social Affairs, and Social Services Ministry.

The law limits data usage for vaccine encouragement only. All information will be deleted after it is used and no later than 60 days after it was received, the bill states.

"The vaccinations are imperative, and this law is meant to increase the number of inoculations among those who are under the impression that they do not need to get vaccinated," MK Haim Katz, chairman of the Labor, Welfare, and Health Committee, said.

"I have been asked, 'What about privacy?' Is the value of privacy more important than the value of life? The information will pertain only to people who can get vaccinated but have yet to do so. Nothing beyond that," he stressed.

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The electronic surveillance is carried out via cellphone triangulation technology. The current extension is to last another three weeks.

Last month, the Knesset plenum, passed legislation to allow the Shin Bet to assist in the national effort to reduce to spread of the coronavirus, sparking debate about the possible infringement of privacy.

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According to Channel 13, which did not cite a source, the program was approved by top Justice Ministry officials, including Attorney General Avichai Mendelblit. The Shin Bet reportedly received permission to operate the program for six months, after which the agency was allowed to proceed with it for another 2.5 years. It is also possible that the tracking is still in place, the report said.

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What, if any, oversight measure are in place is unclear.

The report did not go into detail about what type of data the Shin Bet was gathering, and said that the agency mined data from cellular providers' databases – allegedly without informing them or obtaining permission.

The Justice Ministry issued a statement in response to the report: "The methods the Shin Bet uses in its fight against terrorism and in general are by law classified, and exposing them could cause serious harm to national security. Often, legal issues pertaining to the agency's methods are presented to the attorney general, or one of his representatives, to be evaluated and approved."

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