Privacy & Cybersecurity

According to a report published today in The Wall Street Journal, Target and MasterCard are close to reaching a settlement of the claims of MasterCard-issuing institutions in connection with Target’s 2013 data breach. 

Spring has finally arrived on the East Coast, and not a moment too soon.
Here are 3 privacy & security bits and bytes to start your week.

As we predicted in our post late last month, Google’s YouTube Kids app has attracted more than just the “curious little minds” Google was hoping for.  Yesterday, a group of privacy and children’s rights advocates (including the Center for Digital Democracy and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry) asked the Federal Trade Commission “to investigate whether Google’s YouTube Kids app violates Section 5 of the FTC Act . . . .”

Following up on my recent post on the matter, I had the opportunity to speak with Colin O'Keefe of LXBN on the subject of cross-device tracking. In the brief interview, I discuss the growing prevalence of cross-device tracking and what the FTC is doing in response.

Not only is it Privacy Monday - it is OPENING DAY! After this long, long winter ... welcome back baseball!

President Obama today signed an Executive Order granting authority to the Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) to impose sanctions on individuals and entities determined to be "responsible for or complicit in malicious cyber-enabled activities" that result in harms "reasonably likely to result in, or have materially contributed to, a significant threat to the national security, foreign policy, or economic health or financial stability of the United States."

Our 2015 monthly Privacy Issues Wednesday webinar series continued this month with Jonathan Cain and Paul Pelletier's Responding to Insider Data Theft & Disclosure presentation. 

Facebook does it. Google does it. It's everywhere in the mobile ad ecosystem. And your smartphone does it more often than you know, according to a study released on Monday by Carnegie Mellon.

The Federal Communications Commission’s (“FCC”) net neutrality proceeding culminated this month with the release of an Order reclassifying broadband Internet access service as a common carrier Telecommunications Service subject to regulation under Title II of the Communications Act.

On Friday, the FTC published updates to the COPPA FAQs, the Commission’s compliance guide for businesses and consumers, to address the applicability of COPPA and the Amended COPPA Rule to educational institutions and businesses that provide online services, including mobile apps, to educational institutions.

If you've been following the our sister blog, Employment Matters, then you will understand the headline. If you have not, you should click over there and check out the tournament action on a Friday afternoon while you are ... streaming some other things.

On March 18, 2015 – just three months after denial of a motion to dismiss consumer claims arising from Target’s 2013 data breach – Target and the consumer class filed papers seeking approval of a settlement. The proposed settlement agreement creates a $10 million cash fund to be paid out to class members claiming actual damages arising from the settlement.

Taking another “step” toward developing comprehensive privacy legislation, the White House has released a discussion draft of the Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights Act of 2015. 

While we're not in the habit of driving traffic to other blogs, it is always a pleasure to point to one of our Mintz family of blogs doing some great work -- the Employment Law Matters blog is hosting  a 2015 Employment Law Issues Tournament to go along with your college basketball brackets.

The draft Data Protection Regulation doesn’t offer many carrots to business – and a recent announcement by the Council of the European Union takes away one of the biggest carrots, the “One-Stop Shop” mechanism.

The third presentation in our popular Wednesday Webinar series is coming up on Wednesday, March 25th. Our presenters, Jonathan Cain and Paul Pelletier,  will offer practical advice about responding to data theft and disclosure by employees and former employees.

State legislatures are not waiting for Congressional action on a national data breach notification standard.

Welcome to March (and in the Northeast, the arrival of meteorological spring is welcome indeed......)
We start this month with a question:  Have you looked at your cyber resilience?

These days most employers manage a vast amount of electronic information about their employees, including the employees’ personal identifying information. But, what obligations do employers have to unionized employees with respect to managing that information and bargaining with them in the event of a breach of their private information?

Our 2015 monthly Privacy Issues Wednesday webinar series continued this month with Jennifer Rubin and Gauri Punjabi's Privacy in the Workplace presentation.