WITHOUT KNOWLEDGE OR CONSENT; ProPublica, October 24, 2024

Corey G. Johnson , ProPublica; WITHOUT KNOWLEDGEOR CONSENT

"FOR YEARS, America’s most iconic gun-makers turned over sensitive personal information on hundreds of thousands of customers to political operatives.

Those operatives, in turn, secretly employed the details to rally firearm owners to elect pro-gun politicians running for Congress and the White House, a ProPublica investigation has found.

The clandestine sharing of gun buyers’ identities — without their knowledge and consent — marked a significant departure for an industry that has long prided itself on thwarting efforts to track who owns firearms in America.

At least 10 gun industry businesses, including Glock, Smith & Wesson, Remington, Marlin and Mossberg, handed over names, addresses and other private data to the gun industry’s chief lobbying group, the National Shooting Sports Foundation. The NSSF then entered the gun owners’ details into what would become a massive database.

The data initially came from decades of warranty cards filled out by customers and returned to gun manufacturers for rebates and repair or replacement programs.

A ProPublica review of dozens of warranty cards from the 1970s through today found that some promised customers their information would be kept strictly confidential. Others said some information could be shared with third parties for marketing and sales. None of the cards informed buyers their details would be used by lobbyists and consultants to win elections."

Suicide Hotline Left Ethics Board Out Of The Loop About Data-Sharing With For-Profit Spinoff; Forbes, February 24, 2022

Alexandra S. Levine , Forbes; Suicide Hotline Left Ethics Board Out Of The Loop About Data-Sharing With For-Profit Spinoff

"“Data-sharing with a for-profit company? That's bad... and you can't get consent from people for that in the moment when they're signing up with [a] crisis,” Ranney says. “This would never have passed a sniff test.”"

Pennsylvania High Court Finds Duty to Safeguard Employee Information; Lexology, November 26, 2018

Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler LLP, Lexology; Pennsylvania High Court Finds Duty to Safeguard Employee Information

"The Pennsylvania Supreme Court handed the state’s employees a major legal victory last week when it decided that employers have an affirmative legal responsibility to protect the confidential information of its employees...

In reversing two lower courts, the justices ruled that, by collecting and storing employee’s personal information as a pre-condition to employment, employers had the legal duty to take reasonable steps to protect that information from a cyber-attack...

The ruling revives a proposed class action lawsuit against the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and one of its hospitals, UPMC McKeesport, after a 2014 data breach in which hackers allegedly stole the personal information of 62,000 former and current employees...

Whether the ruling is viewed narrowly as confined to its facts, or more broadly as establishing a general legal duty to safeguard confidential information, there is little question that the decision marks an important development in tort law governing data breach cases...

The case is Dittman et al. v. UPMC, Case No. 43 WAP 2017."

AI ‘gaydar’ could compromise LGBTQ people’s privacy — and safety; Washington Post, February 19, 2018

JD Schramm, Washington Post; AI ‘gaydar’ could compromise LGBTQ people’s privacy — and safety

"The advances in AI and machine learning make it increasingly difficult to hide such intimate traits as sexual orientation, political and religious affiliations, and even intelligence level. The post-privacy future Kosinski examines in his research is upon us. Never has the work of eliminating discrimination been so urgent."