Technology isn’t stuck in the 90s. Why is privacy? Open up any word processing system or many other apps, and you may notice the icon for “Save:” is a 3.5-inch floppy disk. We use this icon dozens of times a week, typically without thinking about it, but it conceals a striking fact. The most common… Read More
For those of us who pay attention to and care about these kinds of things, the Court of Justice of the European Union has issued a ruling today stating that the FTC’s Privacy Shield framework governing the transfer of personal data from Europe to the United States is no longer valid. This ruling is very… Read More
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
When you’re a lawyer and you write about truth, you’re basically asking to be insulted because….you know….you’re a lawyer. It’s true, some of my fellow legal professionals have occasionally had a less than intimate connection with the truth, but, in general, even the best lawyers squint their eyes and look wary when someone talks about… Read More
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
You may not have read the New York Times Privacy Project yet, but if not, now is the time to do so. They have begun a series on the nature of tracking individuals via cellphones, armed with a treasure trove of over 50 billion pings on 12 million phones. The results are dramatic, showing just… Read More
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
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
One of the questions I hear most frequently is “will the GDPR be as big a deal as everyone promised?” Of course, the real question is “will the GDPR be as big a deal as you, Jay, promised,” and it is a fair one. Privacy commentators spent a great deal of time in 2018 talking… 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
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
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
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
Although we consistently discuss the importance of managing data about customers or partners, it’s crucial to pay attention to a key demographic of your intrinsic datasets – employees. Your team generates an enormous volume of data simply by showing up to the office (HR data, payment information, personal login details and passwords, etc), and the… Read More