Bell Canada suffers a data breach, more than half of Android apps don’t follow the new EU data protection regulations, and Elon Musk isn’t getting paid unless Tesla is massively successful.
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First from Twitter is news that Bell Canada has suffered a large data breach that could affect around 100,000 customers. The largest telecoms company in Canada says names, email addresses, account user names and numbers, and phone numbers were accessed, but could not confirm whether credit card, banking, or other sensitive information was taken. The announcement comes just eight months after 1.9 million customer emails were stolen from Bell’s database by an anonymous hacker, but the company would not say whether the two are related. Bell has apologized to customers and the RCMP is currently investigating the incident.
Trending on Reddit today is a report from Israel-based marketplace monitoring company SafeDK saying that 55 per cent of all Android mobile apps may not comply with the new European Union General Data Protection Regulations. The strict data privacy regulations come into effect in Europe on May 25 and they essentially strengthen the rights of individuals to control the use of their personal data. If companies want to operate in the EU, they need to follow these guidelines, but it’s become pretty clear that more than half are not prepared despite ample warnings over the last several months. According to SafeDK’s report, the most commonly accessed private data was a user’s location, second was data about other apps installed on the user’s device, and third was a user’s contacts. The company recommends these mobile app companies make code changes as soon as possible.
And last but not least from Reddit again, Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced last night that he will not get paid unless the company’s value skyrockets. Despite expectations that Tesla’s soon-to-be-released 2017 financial results are quite negative, the new compensation plan with its chief executive ambitiously implies that the company’s stock will grow by a thousand per cent over the next 10 years to eventually reach $650 billion. This feat has been achieved by only a handful of major tech companies ever, such as Amazon and Netflix. The company is currently worth about $60 billion now. The more yearly stock milestones Musk meets, the more stock in Tesla he gets, and if he meets none, he gets nothing. Musk clearly has faith in his company – would you take this deal?