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Category Archives: Legislation

How Loophole in Privacy Law Makes Opting Out of Facebook Data Sharing Difficult

“A new report from Consumer Watchdog shows how thousands of companies share your data with Facebook, including financial companies and health care providers, and how a loophole in California’s premier privacy law makes opting out difficult and time consuming. The report details how the big three web browsers do not offer a global opt out… Continue Reading

It’s not worth paying to be removed from people-finder sites

Ars Technica: “If you’ve searched your name online in the last few years, you know what’s out there, and it’s bad. Alternately, you’ve seen the lowest-common-denominator ads begging you to search out people from your past to see what crimes are on their record. People-search sites are a gross loophole in the public records system,… Continue Reading

Artificial Intelligence Impacts on Privacy Law

Rand Research Published Aug 8, 2024 -“The European Union (EU)’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) Act is a landmark piece of legislation that lays out a detailed and wide-ranging framework for the comprehensive regulation of AI deployment in the European Union covering the development, testing, and use of AI. This is one of several reports intended to… Continue Reading

Utah outlaws books by Judy Blume and Sarah J Maas in first statewide ban

The Guardian: “Books by Margaret Atwood, Judy Blume, Rupi Kaur and Sarah J Maas are among 13 titles that the state of Utah has ordered to be removed from all public school classrooms and libraries. This marks the first time a state has outlawed a list of books statewide, according to PEN America’s Jonathan Friedman,… Continue Reading

Climate Deniers of the 118th Congress

“The Center for American Progress has periodically analyzed statements by sitting members of Congress to determine whether they deny the existence of human-caused climate change. This analysis of the 118th U.S. Congress found that 123 elected officials are climate deniers—23 percent of 535 total members. These 100 representatives and 23 senators wield significant influence on… Continue Reading

Copyright Office Releases Part 1 of Artificial Intelligence Report, Recommends Federal Digital Replica Law

Copyright Office Releases Part 1 of Artificial Intelligence Report, Recommends Federal Digital Replica Law -Issue No. 1048 – July 31, 2024 – Today, the U.S. Copyright Office is releasing Part 1 of its Report on the legal and policy issues related to copyright and artificial intelligence (AI), addressing the topic of digital replicas. This Part… Continue Reading

Breaking Up the Giants of Harm

Breaking Up the Giants of Harm. To protect democracy and have a resilient economy, we must tackle corporate power. Again. “Governments and economic regulators have, since the 1980s, turned a blind eye to a handful of giant companies steadily gaining chokeholds in global markets. Banking, agriculture, digital technology, publishing, music, pharmaceuticals and more are dominated… Continue Reading

Data Privacy Law as a New Field of Law

Papakonstantinou, Vagelis, Data Privacy Law as a New Field of Law (January 06, 2024). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4865297 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4865297 “The turn of the 1980s was a milestone period in the development of data privacy laws, that was only paralleled by the turn of the 2020s. The former saw the introduction of Convention 108 by… Continue Reading

webXray

Wired [unpaywalled]- This Machine Exposes Privacy Violations. A former Google engineer has built a search engine, WebXray, that aims to find illicit online data collection and tracking—with the goal of becoming “the Henry Ford of tech lawsuits.”…It’s a search engine for rooting out specific privacy violations anywhere on the web. By searching for a specific… Continue Reading

Warren Leads Senate Response to End of Chevron Doctrine

Truthout: “A group of senators led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) has introduced a bill to combat the Supreme Court’s seismic pro-corporate decision last month to overturn a precedent known as Chevron deference that has enabled federal agencies to issue regulations for decades. Ten senators joined Warren on Tuesday in introducing the bill that would… Continue Reading

Ryanair Wins Legal Case Against Booking.Com Over Screen Scraping & Reselling Tickets

Bloomberg via MSN: “Ryanair, a major player in European aviation, has won a case in the US court against Booking.com, one of the world’s largest online travel agencies. The US court has ruled that the Dutch agency violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by accessing the Ryanair website without permission. Court documents identified that… Continue Reading