The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held this week that web scraping of publicly accessible data is legal. The case initially arose when LinkedIn sued a company, Hiq Labs, for scraping data off its site in order to evaluate employee attrition. 

The Dutch tax authority was recently fined €3.7 million for GDPR violations stemming from the ‘child care benefits scandal’ first uncovered in 2019. The authority had utilized an algorithm that mistakenly flagged as high-risk tens of thousands of people––many belonging to low income or dual citizen households––as potentially engaging in child care benefits fraud. Mistakenly flagged individuals were denied certain services as a result of their high risk profile, including payment arrangements and debt restructuring. 

The 10th annual Freedom of Expression Scholars Conference will take place on Saturday, April 30 and Sunday, May 1st. It will be preceded by a Symposium organized by the Journal of Free Speech Law on Friday, April 29th at 5pm EST. As in previous years, the conference will be a mix of plenary sessions (one panel discussing multiple papers) and breakout sessions (simultaneous panels, each discussing one paper). All sessions will take place on Zoom. Papers can be found here.

(Compiled by Student Fellow Addison Yang)