Privacy./Unsplash
As every year on January 28, the International Privacy Protection Day, known in Europe as Data Protection Day, was celebrated.
The purpose of the day is to raise awareness and promote the protection of the right to privacy and personal information in the digital space.
In the last year we have seen a significant increase in the public's awareness of their privacy and ownership of their information, despite the lack of regular information privacy regulations in Israel.
New data from the Israeli start-up Mine, which develops solutions in the field of privacy and data protection, provides new details about the Israeli and international services that hold information about us, and how Israelis conduct themselves online with these services.
What is the situation in Israel?
From the data deletion system developed by Main, it appears that the information details of an average Israeli user are in the hands of no less than 300 different online companies and services.
It also appears that the Israeli surfer has become more aware of the content he shares and the information he shares.
In 2023, the Israelis sent over 50,000 deletion requests to about 19,000 online services and websites through MINE.
Compared to previous years, there is a trend of a decrease in the amount of "digital footprints" that the Israeli leaves behind on the net, with a decrease of 30% compared to the previous year.
Despite the decrease in private information that Israeli surfers leave online, Mine's data shows that Israelis still have a "digital footprint" that is 20% larger than the world average.
Where do most Israelis want to be "forgotten"?
Coincidentally or not, January is also the month in which Israelis send the most deletion requests to the services they subscribe to.
In the month of January, on average, 20 times more deletion requests are sent than in the other months of the year.
The beginning of the year is a good time to do a "digital housecleaning" and wisely manage online risks.
At the top of the list of websites from which the most Israelis asked to be forgotten is icount, which deals with accounting, in second place is the ecommerce wish website, followed by ezcount, cardcom, snapchat, ladpc, ebay, femi, pinterest and the top ten is rounded off by rivhit.
In the second ten are prominent websites such as: jobmaster, tabit, eventer, invoice4u, wix, myheritage, bezeqint.net, Electra, pelephone, ksp, shufersal and dominos.
And what is happening in the world?
MINE founders from right to left: Kobi Nissan, Gal Ringel and Gal Golan./MINE
In Europe, the GDPR privacy regulation is still the strictest of the global regulations.
The year 2023 was a year of significant prosperity in the issue of privacy in the US as well, where privacy regulations emerged like mushrooms after the rain, and laws were enacted in over 13 American states.
The system developed by Maine is currently used by over 5 million users, who in recent years have sent deletion requests to over 1.1 A million services and companies. And this is thanks to over 33 million active deletion requests that Maine sent through its systems.
The websites from which the most people in the world requested to delete their details according to Maine are:
pinterest, twitter, wish, change, adobe, quora, snapchat, spotify , ebay, instagram, scribd, amazon, booking, aliexpress, the list of the first 15 places is closed by the dating app tinder
Gal Ringel, CEO and founder of Mine
explains that although our information is everywhere, only 15% of the cases are active services We make regular use. That is, on 85% of the sites where the user leaves details - he will not visit more than once. According to Ringel, the main problem is that Israeli companies are not bound by privacy regulations, and therefore are not bound to delete the personal information of consumers, which increases Despite this, Ringel claims, quite a few Israeli companies that respect the issue of privacy and the 'right to be forgotten', operate in accordance with international regulations.
More on the same topic:
Online privacy
The right for privacy