Like everyone, I’m exhausted by the confusion and controversy surrounding the election — this week has been a year. So, great news: today’s blog is going to be about a confusing, controversial law just passed in California by a wide margin! The law in question is the California Privacy Rights Act, also called Prop 24,… Read More
Innovative Data Partnerships (Part II)
We’ve already spent some time discussing the kind of partnerships where a small, innovative firm wants to partner with a larger one to create new value and drive growth. Many times, this is how the smaller business gets its foot in the door, and (together, perhaps, with a channel agreement) first is able to get… Read More
Predictions, Lists, and Complete Wild Guesses II
After a whirlwind start to this year (let’s leave the decade debates aside please), we’re finally ready to start making our 2020 predictions for privacy, data partnerships, and data strategy. This is where we lay out our view for how businesses, regulators, government, and internet users will shift the rules and change the way we… Read More
Facebook’s Privacy Game
Fads are a big part of January. Everyone wants to hashtag their efforts at keeping up their New Year’s Resolution (#NoCheeseMonth, #NoCarbMonth, #NoFunMonth), and our collective refusal to acknowledge that the holidays are over means we’re all still desperate for distractions. But nobody minds, because we all love fads — it’s why we get obsessed… Read More
2019: The Year of Meh
To me, the most meaningful meme of this year was “OK, Boomer” (Baby Yoda was a non-event, don’t @ me). It not only perfectly captures the very real, politically potent generational conflict going on right now, but it also reflects how completely ignored Generation X is in our current culture wars. (I feel no guilt… Read More
2019 Predictions: How Did We Do?
You may recall that we made some predictions way back in January about what would happen in privacy, privacy law, and data partnerships over the course of 2019. Well, we believe in accountability, and so it’s time to check out how well we did. There’s a reason that most people don’t reflect on their New… Read More
The Privacy Quadrant: A DataSmart Approach to User Consent
Very often, we hear clients or businesses express the idea that “we want to give our customers control over the privacy of their data, and that sounds good, but making it a reality is much more complicated.” That’s a fair assessment — operationalizing privacy is something that companies in the U.S. have a difficult time… Read More
A Follow-Up Q&A on LinkedIn v. hiQ
After our discussion of LinkedIn v. hiQ earlier this week, we received a lot of questions from clients and readers about the implications of the case. We thought it might be easier to compile some of these questions and our responses to continue the conversation about this important case. Q. It seems unfair that hiQ… Read More
The Challenges of Ethical AI
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
The Contours of Facial Recognition
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
Getting Bad Advice
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
How to Protect Your Data in a Data Partnership – from “Data Leverage”
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
What’s Five Billion Among (Facebook) Friends?
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
The Undefended Principles of a Free Internet
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 World’s Toughest Internet Law?
It seems that every time we turn around, there’s new data or Internet legislation on the table that the media describes along the lines of “similar to the GDPR,” or “GDPR-like.” It makes sense, of course, given that the GDPR is the most important legislation on privacy in several generations, though it can blur some… Read More
We’re Learning the Wrong Lessons
It’s easy to criticize companies like Facebook or Google for their conduct when it comes to data, largely because they are so frequently the subject of widely-publicized reports and news articles. The stories documenting tech giant misdeeds (ironically, often displayed in Facebook’s newsfeed) demonstrate a growing awareness of surveillance capitalism and surveillance states, as well… Read More
The Joke’s On You
There are times when it’s difficult to pick a topic to write about for this blog, because data privacy and data partnerships are such broad subjects that it’s like selecting from an unlimited menu of issues. We could discuss GDPR or CCPA or a data breach or technological trends or creating a mutually beneficial data… Read More
The Seven Deadly (Data Privacy) Sins
One of the questions we hear most frequently is “what are we doing wrong?” We almost always try to flip that question around into “what can we do better,” because we’re big believers in the notion that providing goals, rather than chastising, creates the right kind of mindset about data privacy and managing a data… Read More
FTC’s Privacy Report Card
It’s that time of year again – the FTC has released its report on enforcement activity in 2018, including its efforts at enforcing privacy promises. It was, as you might expect, a busy year, with major proceedings instituted against a number of high-profile entities like Uber, Paypal, and Facebook. Although the total amount in fines… Read More
Takeaways from the Cardlinx Forum 2019
Last week, we had the chance to attend Cardlinx’s forum in San Francisco, one of the four or so they host worldwide every year. Cardlinx is an industry association for merchants, credit card issuers, and rewards/loyalty programs, with an eye towards establishing industry standards for “mobile payments, in-store offers, card-linking” and other technology tied to… Read More