Navigating the patchwork of U.S. privacy and cybersecurity laws: key regulatory updates from summer 2023; Reuters, October 9, 2023

Felicia Jafferies and Amanda Graham Brazinski, Reuters; Navigating the patchwork of U.S. privacy and cybersecurity laws: key regulatory updates from summer 2023

"The increasing patchwork of privacy and cybersecurity statutes, rules, and regulations on the state and federal level will likely result in further compliance costs to entities. In addition, these new laws create new grounds for governmental oversight that could result in a costly defense of regulatory investigations and exposure to civil penalties.

Indeed, federal and state regulators continue to enforce existing laws that may touch on privacy and cybersecurity with increasing frequency, and the addition of these new laws provide regulators with an increased ability to bring enforcement actions. Finally, the public disclosure requirements that many of these laws require expose companies to more potential lawsuits following any public notification resulting from an incident."

EU legal advisor: disclosing identities of suspected copyright pirates "compatible" with EU privacy laws; Boing Boing, September 29, 2023

 ROB BESCHIZZA, Boing Boing; EU legal advisor: disclosing identities of suspected copyright pirates "compatible" with EU privacy laws

"Releasing pirates' identities is "Compatible With EU Privacy Laws," says a top legal advisor to the European Union's highest court following the discovery that the French government retains more than a decade of data collected about millions of people suspected of infringing copyrights."

Privacy laws need updating after Google deal with HCA Healthcare, medical ethics professor says; CNBC, May 26, 2021

Emily DeCiccio, CNBC; Privacy laws need updating after Google deal with HCA Healthcare, medical ethics professor says

"Privacy laws in the U.S. need to be updated, especially after Google struck a deal with a major hospital chain, medical ethics expert Arthur Kaplan said Wednesday.

“Now we’ve got electronic medical records, huge volumes of data, and this is like asking a navigation system from a World War I airplane to navigate us up to the space shuttle,” Kaplan, a professor at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine, told “The News with Shepard Smith.” “We’ve got to update our privacy protection and our informed consent requirements.”

On Wednesday, Google’s cloud unit and hospital chain HCA Healthcare announced a deal that — according to The Wall Street Journal — gives Google access to patient records. The tech giant said it will use that to make algorithms to monitor patients and help doctors make better decisions."

Big tech firms still don’t care about your privacy; The Washington Post, January 28, 2019

Rob Pegoraro, The Washington Post; Big tech firms still don’t care about your privacy

"Today is Data Privacy Day. Please clap.

This is an actual holiday of sorts, recognized as such in 2007 by the Council of Europe to mark the anniversary of the 1981 opening of Europe’s Convention for the Protection of Individuals With Regard to Automatic Processing of Personal Data — the grandfather of such strict European privacy rules as the General Data Protection Regulation.

In the United States, Data Privacy Day has yet to win more official acknowledgment than a few congressional resolutions. It mainly serves as an opportunity for tech companies to publish blog posts about their commitment to helping customers understand their privacy choices.

But in a parallel universe, today might feature different headlines. Consider the following possibilities."

When Scientists Develop Products From Personal Medical Data, Who Gets To Profit?; NPR, May 31, 2018

Richard Harris, NPR; When Scientists Develop Products From Personal Medical Data, Who Gets To Profit?

"If you go to the hospital for medical treatment and scientists there decide to use your medical information to create a commercial product, are you owed anything as part of the bargain?

That's one of the questions that is emerging as researchers and product developers eagerly delve into digital data such as CT scans and electronic medical records, making artificial-intelligence products that are helping doctors to manage information and even to help them diagnose disease.

This issue cropped up in 2016, when Google DeepMind decided to test an app that measures kidney health by gathering 1.6 million records from patients at the Royal Free Hospital in London. The British authorities found this broke patient privacy laws in the United Kingdom. (Update on June 1 at 9:30 a.m. ET: DeepMind says it was able to deploy its app despite the violation.)

But the rules are different in the United States."

An American Alternative to Europe’s Privacy Law; The New York Times, May 30, 2018

Tim Wu, The New York Times; An American Alternative to Europe’s Privacy Law

"To be sure, a European-style regulatory system operates faster and has clearer rules than an American-style common-law approach. But the European approach runs the risk of being insensitive to context and may not match our ethical intuitions in individual cases. If the past decade of technology has taught us anything, it is that we face a complex and varied array of privacy problems. Case-by-case consideration might be the best way to find good solutions to many of them and, when the time comes (ifthe time comes), to guide the writing of general federal privacy legislation.

A defining fact of our existence today is that we share more of ourselves with Silicon Valley than with our accountants, lawyers and doctors. It is about time the law caught up with that."

Push for Internet Privacy Rules Moves to Statehouses; New York Times, March 26, 2017

Conor Dougherty, New York Times; Push for Internet Privacy Rules Moves to Statehouses

"Last year, Nebraska and West Virginia passed laws that limit how companies can monitor employees’ social media accounts, while legislators in Hawaii, Missouri and elsewhere are pushing similar bills for employees, as well as for students and tenants.

“More and more, states have taken the position that, if Congress is not willing or able to enact strong privacy laws, their legislatures will no longer sit on their hands,” said Chad Marlow, a lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union.

Online privacy is the rare issue that draws together legislators from the left and the far right. At the state level, anyway, some of the progress has come from a marriage between progressive Democrats and libertarian-minded Republicans, who see privacy as a bedrock principle, Mr. Marlow said."

Privacy Laws and Listener Data in the Music Industry; Inside Counsel, March 2, 2017

Adrian J. Perry and Sari Sharoni, Inside Counsel; 

Privacy Laws and Listener Data in the Music Industry

"Whether and how state privacy laws across the United States apply to the collection and sharing of listener preference data could have a profound effect on not only the ability of music streaming services to deliver their content to listeners, but on the future of music and the music industry generally.

A recent U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit decision, in which the court dismissed a proposed class action suit against Pandora for disclosure of listener music preferences in violation of Michigan's Preservation of Personal Privacy Act (PPPA), shed light on the uncertainty looming over the music industry from the prospect of state privacy law placing constraints on the alienability of this valuable data.

The Michigan PPPA, in relevant part, prohibits a business engaged in selling, renting, or lending sound recordings from knowingly disclosing to anyone information that personally identifies a particular customer as having purchased, leased, rented, or borrowed those sound recordings from that business. The question before the Ninth Circuit was whether this statute could be construed to prohibit Pandora, a music streaming service with both paid and ad-supported unpaid options, from disclosing listener preference data."

The Sara Fine Institute presents, "Digital Privacy Workshop for Librarians"; iSchool at Pitt, 3/31/16

The Sara Fine Institute presents, "Digital Privacy Workshop for Librarians" :

"Amelia Acker and Leanne Bowler will be co-hosting a Digital Privacy Workshop for Librarians on Thursday, March 31, 2016; 1:00 – 4:00 PM. Students are welcome.

  The workshop will be presented by Alison Macrina of Library Freedom Project and Bruce J. Boni, attorney and president of the ACLU-PA Greater Pittsburgh Chapter. They will present a hands-on, "know your privacy rights" workshop for librarians, demonstrating strategies to help keep library patrons safe from surveillance. Topics include: the government's major surveillance programs and authorizations, federal and local privacy law, and information on how to respond when served with a government information request. The workshop includes a demonstration of practical privacy-enhancing technology tools that can be installed on public PCs or taught to patrons in computer classes.

Details about the workshop and how to register can be found here: https://tockify.com/ischool/detail/168/1459443600000