Best of Data Privacy — January 2025

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   Article

   TechCrunch·1y

   How OpenAI’s bot crushed this seven-person company’s web site ‘like a DDoS attack’

   Triplegangers, a small company specializing in 3D image files, faced disruption when OpenAI's bot significantly overloaded their ecommerce site, akin to a DDoS attack. The bot attempted to download the company's extensive database of images, leading to site crashes and anticipated high server costs. This incident highlights the importance of properly configuring robot.txt files to block unwanted bots and the challenges small businesses face in protecting their data against AI scrapers.

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2. 2
   Article

   Community Picks·1y

   Aptabase • Analytics for Mobile, Desktop and Web apps

   Aptabase offers an easy-to-use, open-source alternative to Google Firebase Analytics for mobile and desktop apps, ensuring comprehensive data privacy by anonymizing data points. Users can start with a free plan and scale as needed, with no overage fees. Aptabase emphasizes strong data privacy by not selling user data and providing an option for self-hosting.

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3. 3
   Article

   Hacker News·1y

   PostgreSQL Anonymizer

   PostgreSQL Anonymizer is an extension for masking or replacing personally identifiable information (PII) or commercially sensitive data in a PostgreSQL database. It features a declarative approach to anonymization, allowing developers to define masking rules directly within the database schema. Various masking methods and functions are provided to apply data anonymization effectively. The extension also includes detection functions to identify columns needing anonymization. This helps enhance data privacy without compromising database functionality.

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