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As usual for this time of year, we always think it’s a bit of fun to look back at the last 12 months and see how technology in 2023 has shaped up – who were the winners and who fell flat of expectations over the year.

Winners

AI

AI has made a huge impact in the year 2023. ChatGPT was released by OpenAI on the 30^th of November 2022 and quickly took over the internet, receiving the most user signups out of all applications.

ChatGPT is a predictive language model. Although these existed before, OpenAI was the first to make it commercially available. Unlike other chatbots that are designed to perform specific tasks, ChatGPT is a conversational model that can respond to any query from its large database.

This caused a chain reaction among the big companies to push out their AI and gain some of the market share. AI will change the way we work next year with Microsoft CoPilot coming out for enterprise companies.

Cloud Adoption

As always, Microsoft and Amazon have been pushing for more control over the Public Cloud space. As a result, more companies have migrated services to the cloud or running Hybrid setups with it. At Planet IT we have seen a huge increase in growth for customers wanting Microsoft Azure to run their infrastructure. This will continue into 2024 and from 2025 we will expect to see more than 90% of businesses being cloud only.

Losers

Microsoft Windows Operating Systems

2023 saw the end of life for Windows Server 2012, this forced a lot of companies to upgrade their server or utilise Microsoft’s offering for extended 2012 support in Microsoft Azure. This will become a common occurrence as Microsoft looks to end its support for its aging operating systems such as 2016 and 2019 in favour of moving you to the Azure Cloud.

Twitter / X

Twitter was brought out by Elon Musk on the 27^th of October. And depending on what side of the fence you sit on this, is either bad or good. The acquisition has been a topic of debate in the media. Some examples include Elon’s hostile takeover of Twitter; renaming Twitter to X; promising an open-sourced algorithm; banning bots and hypocrisy about free speech.

X has been under pressure from watchdogs and civic organisations. This is due to its inability to combat propaganda. For instance, spreading misleading information on the Russia-Ukraine war, the Israel-Hamas war, and the upcoming presidential election.

There are lots of social media commentary this week around the changes in the WhatsApp privacy policy.

First of all yes this privacy policy is scary and moves WhatsApp ever closer to Facebook in terms of their approach to who has the right to user data and what its worth to the business. However should you worry about it as a U.K or EU citizen? No. And the reason for that is simple, WhatsApp has to adhere to the guidance as laid out in the articles which form GDPR, therefore they cannot use the data or share this data with it’s parent company Facebook for the purposes of remarketing as it would be outside the fair use of the data.

That said, Facebook are looking to move Facebook access for UK users away from their Facebook Ireland entity to being governed by Facebook Inc. This would therefore change their obligations as your account would sit outside of the GDPR region. Furthermore, following the U.K. leaving the EU they would be able to do this and therefore WhatsApp would fall under the privacy policy of the U.S.

Planet IT security health check

So in short, don’t panic right now. There is no need to leave WhatsApp or not accept the terms in February. However, when Facebook moves the U.K. to be governed and controlled by the U.S., then if you want your data from being used for a number of questionable activities you need to leave and delete your Facebook account and do the same for WhatsApp.

I hope this quick thought helped you demystify the current situation.

If you want to talk to me about information security and data protection then please call 01235 433900 or you can reach out to me via DM or at [email protected].

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Quick Thoughts – Information Security – WhatsApp Data Sharing 2021

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