Data Strategy and Legal Compliance
Not every data partnership involves equals. Often, a smaller company with a new idea, or a new take on an established idea, will offer partners the ability to revise their own business strategy. These small but creative firms are often looking for what we call an innovator data partnership, which means they have a potentially… Read More
The mutually beneficial data partnership may sound like a unicorn, but it is actually quite common. Market forces drive these partnerships for one of three reasons: shared clients, operational teams, and marketing. This contrasts with innovator partnerships, which are driven by sales opportunities, product innovation and channel distribution. Mutually beneficial partnerships tend to between partners… Read More
Summer is always an interesting time for lawyers, because it’s the time of year when the Supreme Court’s term comes to a close and when, typically, they issue their most controversial or difficult rulings. In fact, the Court sometimes waits until the actual last day of the term before handing out the tough, 5-4 split… Read More
To create the maximum value, urgency, and leverage in a data partnership, you must present the data available for sale or partnership in a clear and comprehensive way. Partnerships are based upon the concept that you are offering value for value, whether paid or traded. Friendship might need no reasons, but partnerships require some understanding… Read More
A strong approach to data requires constant attention not just to the quantity of data you take in, but the quality as well. It’s never enough to know what data you have; good data strategy demands that you have a firm grasp on the value of that data. That is not a static exercise, but… Read More
There have been dozens of articles and news pieces about the need for “ethics in AI” or “ethical AI.” This (apparently brand new) issue arises from a number of causes, including public concern over facial recognition, the use of automated decisionmaking, and the ongoing public fascination with the darker side of artificial intelligence (see: Black… Read More
One curious effect of the commonness of data breaches is that we’ve become inured against shock. It used to be that a sizeable data breach was big news, certainly if the data lost or accessed was of a sensitive nature. Remember the Target data breach in 2013? It dominated news cycles for weeks, largely because… Read More
You may have seen yesterday that Apple took another step in its recent efforts to become the public’s favorite privacy-protecting tech giant. At WWDC, the company’s annual developer conference, CEO Tim Cook unveiled the new “Sign In with Apple” feature, a user authentication platform. Like the secure sign-on (SSO) platforms designed by Google and Facebook,… Read More
We’ve know a number of clients or friends whose businesses are going through the initial phases of a data partnership lately. These relationships are often mission-critical, because without the added benefits of the data partnership, sometimes entire business strategies fall apart. At the same time, if you don’t take a thoughtful approach to establishing the… Read More
When you think about it, facial recognition is a deeply “human” action. It’s the most common way for people to recognize one another, it’s one of the earliest stages of our developmental attachment to our parents, and it is, by far, the easiest way to evaluate someone’s credibility, intentions, and personality. It explains why we… Read More
The Internet is a risky place for “expertise.” Because it is both a platform and a megaphone, it creates its own multiplier effect for whatever you put into it. If the arguments of the last few years have proven anything, it’s that even a poorly concocted lie spreads far faster than a well-explained truth, largely… Read More
One recent trend that makes privacy professionals very nervous is the “what’s my DNA say about me” fad. You swab your cheek, mail it off to a lab, and presto: you learn that you’re 99% Irish/Scottish and 1% Pacific Islander with a high chance of getting appendicitis. Obviously, unlocking the mysteries of our ancestry is… Read More
We spend an enormous amount of time talking about the benefits of data partnerships but, of course, they aren’t without their risks. No one enters into a business relationship assuming that everything will go exactly as planned (without serious problems later, anyway). But how do you identify ways to protect your business, your data, and… Read More
If we’ve had this happen once, it’s happened several dozen times. We’ll be discussing our book, or our practice, or how we approach privacy issues, and someone will say something like “Yes, well, you know, data is the new x.” And x can be anything. Oil, money, gold, papayas, whatever. The analogy is, essentially, that… Read More
The Internet went into full “give me a Drudge Report siren” mode last week about Facebook’s announcement that it anticipates a fine of three to five billion dollars from the FTC in the coming months. The fine, a result of Facebook’s violation of a 2011 consent decree with the Commission related to privacy practices, tracking,… Read More
Biometric data is information at its most sensitive. Not only do health and physical characteristics carry with them the very concept of our personhood and humanity, they are also often immutable and, therefore, permanently identify us. I can change my email address or my password, and I can even get a new legal name if… Read More
Ask any young litigation associate in a large law firm what the most important skill they learned in their first few years practicing was, and the honest ones will say “Control-c, Control-v.” Yes, Copy-and-Paste activities occupy an enormous portion of young associates’ time, for a number of reasons. They’re risk averse, so they want to… Read More
The longer you spend in data-oriented businesses, the more you notice a funny thing about the language used to describe data sets and their uses. While, early on, the language sounds a lot like what you’d use to describe currency (“valuable,” “fungible,” “velocity,”), eventually it all starts to sound like you’re talking about food (“organic,”… Read More
For most of us who remember a time before widespread access to the Internet (it was mostly Donald Duck games on your Commodore), going online was a decidedly American-feeling affair. One could be forgiven the thought, given that the largest internet service provider for years was….America Online. And, largely, that tracked the history and development… Read More
The Boston Dynamics “dogs” have become something of an inside joke around here: any time we want to suggest that an idea, project, or new technology might have worrisome long-term implications, the robotic canines come up in conversation. Much of it has to do with their somewhat surreal, uncanny valley look, something familiar enough to… Read More