Really, people? The EU goes through a forty-year process to craft the most meaningful development in privacy law to protect individual privacy, trade, culture, and exchange on the internet against the Information-Industrial Complex, and then 20 months later passes a law that will dramatically strengthen the market position of….the Information Industrial Complex? In fact, the… Read More
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
Transparency is one of the principles driving recent developments in data privacy and data security. We’ve spent a lot of time discussing how important it is to be open with consumers and data subjects, to give them a clear idea of how their data is used, and why. The primary reason for this is to… Read More
It’s Data Protection Day, the happiest day of the year! A year ago, we were talking about the changes that GDPR would bring, and how to gear up operations to ensure that you didn’t violate the law or mislead your customers. The premise was simple: transparency is a fundamental precept under GDPR (and US law),… Read More
Now that it’s January and everyone is finally returning to the reality where things don’t always taste like peppermint or eggnog (or both, which is just….no), it’s a good time to think about how you’re going to approach 2019. This time of year is rife with predictions and, more often, guesses about what privacy, tech,… Read More
It should be clear by now that we are most comfortable expressing our thoughts in the form of movie quotes, falling as we do into that demographic of Americans who believe that if you can’t say it with a gif from an 80s movie, you don’t need to say it at all. Really, it works… Read More
One day before the midterm elections, and we’re fully into the silly season of data-related legislation in the United States, with prospective members of Congress setting forth their approach to managing privacy and security with a variety of proposals that are….let’s call them “interesting.” I say “interesting” because it’s intriguing to see that candidates treat… Read More
Another week, another series of massive data breaches. Of the few we heard about in the last seven days, none are as concerning as Facebook’s breach involving more than 50 million user accounts. Those are the kinds of numbers that, depending upon how the breach occurred, could incur a massive penalty at the hands of… Read More
It’s been a whirlwind few weeks since GDPR came into effect, and it seems that many people are learning about privacy rights for the first time. Plenty of them are making data subject access or deletion requests, including against the biggest players in the market. Even though there were years’ worth of stories about data… Read More
The news just has not been kind to Facebook the last three months. First the Cambridge Analytica scandal breaks, then the company runs those wrong-footed commercials (“Sorry for selling access to your data and, you know, for stuff like Brexit“), and now comes the revelation that the apologies needed to go much deeper. Despite an… Read More
There are 72 hours to go until GDPR Day (#privmas), and you can almost feel CISOs hoping that, if there’s going to be a breach, it happens today and not on Monday. We noted once before that Andrea Jelinek, chair of the (very important) Article 29 Working Party deadpanned that “there will be a two… Read More
The demonstration of Google Duplex has both stunned and terrified the world. AI can do that. For some legal insights into this, check out Jay Ward’s discussion on his blog post here. If you haven’t watched the video yet, its worth the few minutes to understand what all the commotion is about. We play the… Read More
As we roll into the final two weeks of our countdown, we’re going to take something of a step back and look at issues more broadly. Yesterday, we discussed Google’s AI, and how we’re all going to be living in the Duplex, as it were. I am (clearly) pretty hung up on this, and have… Read More
Machine learning and artificial intelligence are the “it” buzzwords of mid-2018, and even after our short attention spans turn to something else, the concepts behind the words will continue to evolve. Everyone talks about Skynet and the inevitable rise of our robot overlords, and most of the time they’re joking (other than when they show our friends the Boston… Read More