Statistics from International Data Privacy Day show that Israelis are more exposed online than the average web surfer in the world, according to an interview with MINE startup CEO Gal Ringel on Sunday.
January 28th of each year is known as International Privacy Protection Day, or Data Protection Day in Europe. The purpose of this day is to educate and promote the protection of privacy and personal information rights in the digital space. Despite Israel’s lack of regular information privacy regulations, public awareness of privacy and information ownership has increased significantly over the past year.
New data from “MINE”, an Israeli startup developing solutions in the field of privacy and data protection, reveals which Israeli and international services hold information about us and how Israelis behave online with these services. provided new details about
What about the situation in Israel?
A data deletion system developed by MINE shows that the average Israeli user’s personal information is in the hands of as many as 300 different companies and online services. Nevertheless, this data also shows that Israeli surfers have become more conscious of the content and information they share. In 2023, Israelis submitted more than 50,000 takedown requests to approximately 19,000 online services and websites through MINE. The amount of “digital footprint” left by Israelis online has been on the decline compared to previous years, dropping by 30% from the previous year. Despite the decline in personal information that Israeli surfers leave online, MINE data shows that Israelis’ “digital footprint” is still 20% larger than the global average.
What information would you like most Israelis to forget?
Coincidentally or not, January is also the month when Israelis submit the most takedown requests to the services they subscribe to. On average, we receive 20 times more removal requests in January than in any other month. The beginning of the year is a good time to do some “digital housecleaning” and manage your online risks wisely. At the top of the list of websites most Israelis wish they’d forgotten about is icount, an accounting service. In second place is the website ecommerce wish, followed by ezcount, cardcom solutions, Snapchat, ladpc, eBay, femi, Pinterest, and the top 10 is rounded off by rivhit. Following these, you will find proMINEnt sites such as jobmaster, tabit, eventer, invoice4u, Wix, myheritage, bezeqint.net, Electra, pelephone, ksp, shufersal, Domino’s, etc.
What does data privacy look like around the world?
In Europe, the pioneering GDPR privacy regulations remained the most stringent of the global regulations. 2023 was also a big year for privacy issues in the US, with privacy regulations emerging like mushrooms after the rain, with laws enacted in more than 13 US states.
The system developed by MINE is currently used by over 5 million users and has sent takedown requests to over 1.1 million services and companies in recent years. This is thanks to his over 33 million activity deletion requests that MINE forwarded through our system. The sites where most people around the world asked for their details to be deleted by his MINE are Pinterest, Twitter, Wish, Change, Adobe, Quora, Snapchat, Spotify, eBay, Instagram, Scribd, Amazon, Booking, AliExpress , and finally Tinder.
Gal Ringel, CEO of MINE, explains that our information is everywhere, but only 15% of cases are active services that we use on a regular basis. This means that on 85% of sites where users leave details, they won’t return to it more than once. “The main problem is that Israeli companies are not bound by privacy regulations and therefore have no obligation to delete consumers’ personal information, which increases digital risk,” Ringel said. Nevertheless, Ringel maintains that a significant number of Israeli companies operate in accordance with international regulations, respecting privacy concerns and the “right to be forgotten.”
