Category: Uncategorized

Clubhouse, the audio-based social networking app, has faced a host of privacy issues. Clubhouse is facing regulatory/legal issues in Germany, apparently linked to its collection of contact information and its GDPR compliance. Part of the issue seems to be linked to its creation of shadow profiles for people for who have not joined the app but whose personal information was contained in the contacts uploaded by others.

Clubhouse also briefly went unblocked by the Chinese firewall, facilitating some open dialog before it was eventually shut down by censors.

An in-depth Kate Klonick New Yorker article describes the efforts to form Facebook’s new “Supreme Court,” which will ultimately have responsibility for the company’s content moderation decisions.

A recent Wired article discussed a study where researchers trained an algorithm to read x-rays and correlated it with patient reports of pain from injuries/illnesses. It outperformed radiologists in predicting the level of pain patients actually reported, particularly with Black patients.

Microsoft endorsed an Australian proposal to require gatekeepers like Facebook and Google (along with its own Bing search engine) to share revenues with local news organizations, not long after Google and Facebook threatened to scale back their services in the country if the proposal were to take effect.

(compiled by student fellow Andrew Mather)

Global Privacy Control is a global internet browser opt out that sends a general signal for users wanting as little data collection and sharing as possible. The GPC standard will let users signal that they don’t want services to share their data with third-party data brokers, and will give users a way to protect their data after it’s been collected and ensure personal information doesn’t travel too far.

Planned legislation to establish new business areas in Nevada would allow technology companies to effectively form separate local governments.

The Cyberlaw Clinic filed an amicus brief last week in the Superior Court of New Jersey, Appellate Division, on behalf of Upturn, Inc., a nonprofit organization that advocates for equity and justice in the design, governance, and use of technology. The brief supports the defendant-movant, Corey Pickett, in an appeal seeking source code access to TrueAllele, a DNA analysis software developed by Cybergenetics.

Klobuchar on Thursday introduced the Competition and Antitrust Law Enforcement Reform Act, which would make it harder for big companies to get mergers approved and would give enforcers like the Federal Trade Commission and Justice Department sharper teeth.

Facial recognition technology amplifies racist policing, threatens the right to protest and should be banned globally, Amnesty International said as it urged New York City to pass a ban on its use in mass surveillance by law enforcement.

Exposing.ai, unveiled in January, lets you know whether photos you’ve posted to image-sharing site Flickr have been used to advance this controversial application of artificial intelligence by allowing you to search more than 3.6 million photos in six facial-recognition image datasets.

(compiled by student fellow Jacob Golan)

Senator Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) investigation into Amazon Ring doorbell reveals egregiously lax privacy policies and civil rights protections. Lawmaker found Ring has no evidentiary standards for law enforcement to request video footage, no compliance mechanisms to ensure footage of children isn’t collected

The hot new COVID tech is wearable and constantly tracks you. Sports leagues, large employers and colleges are turning to devices that could usher in more invasive forms of surveillance.

Stop COVID with NOVID: NOVID is a next-generation mobile application with Pre-Exposure Notifications which allow users to proactively make decisions based on their risk of infection. We are the only mobile solution with:

Amazon launches Amazon Pharmacy, a delivery service for prescription medications. Poses several privacy concerns.

Microsoft announces it will challenge every government request for public sector or enterprise customer data and it will provide monetary compensation to users if it discloses their data in response to a government request in violation of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

The United Nations issues a joint Statement on Data Protection and Privacy in the COVID-19 Response

Tim Berners Lee’s startup Inrupt releases Solid privacy platform for enterprises

The Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, Navdeep Bains, proposed legislation in Parliament that aims to overhaul Canada’s data privacy law. Bill C-11 will create new data privacy obligations and new enforcement mechanisms for these obligations if it becomes law.

(compiled by Student Fellow Jacob Golan)

Arthur Conan Doyle’s estate sued Netflix because Sherlock Holmes is portrayed in Enola Holmes as compassionate, a portrayal of Sherlock Holmes that only took place in the final 10 books which are still under copyright.

The Association for Civil Rights in Israel has filed freedom of information petitions against the Israeli army and Israeli police to find information about their use of facial recognition.

Activists have begun working on a facial recognition system to identify law enforcement members.

EU court released a judgment in a suit brought by Privacy International that sought to define privacy obligations under the privacy directive.

California Proposition 24 is on track to be approved by voters which would expand the state’s privacy laws and allow customers to opt in or out to certain privacy protections.

The LGPD’s (Brazil’s general data protection law) regulatory authority finally has directors and can begin regulating.

Michigan amended their constitution to require a warrant to search electronic devices or communications; Portland ME outlawed facial recognition via referendum; STOP settled a lawsuit with the NYPD that challenged the NYPD’s practice of requiring religious people to remove their head coverings so their mugshots could be fed into a facial recognition database.

Due to widespread civil unrest in Africa a number of countries have restricted use of social media: Lesotho has sought to require those with 100 or more followers to register with a central communications agency; Tanzania restricted the use of social media during its most recent election; Nigeria has also sought to regulate social media after recent national protests.

Massachusetts approved a right to repair law for cars that will give owners access to the data that the cars collect.

The Fourth Circuit affirmed a denial of a preliminary injunction that sought to stop Baltimore’s aerial surveillance program.

(compiled by student fellow Jacob Apkon)

Apple has been hit with an antitrust complaint by the Interactive Advertising Bureau in France over its planned privacy settings which will limit the ability of app developers to track users unless the users give explicit consent. (Link)

A proposed ban on facial recognition by police agencies and companies in Portland, Oregon has been complicated by an individual’s development of a facial recognition system that would identify police officers, a system which would be allowed under the new bill. (NY Times)

Facebook has demanded that NYU Ad Observatory cease its monitoring and collecting data on political advertisements on the platform claiming a breach of its terms of service provisions on bulk data collection without permissions. (WSJ)

Zoom shut down a series events in the United States, including one held by NYU, discussing Zoom’s previous shut down of a San Francisco State University organized talk by Leila Khaled, a Palestinian activist and a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a US designated terror organization. The events did not have Leila Khaled presenting in their meetings, but discussed the previous event cancellation and statements made by Khaled. (Buzzfeed; AAUP)

(compiled by Student Fellow Maxwell Votey)

The University of Miami has recently come under scrutiny for its alleged use of facial recognition technology to target students participating in protests. The University has denied that it utilizes such technology, although it admitted to the use of video surveillance. (WSJ)

The Trump reelection campaign has been videotaping voters dropping off ballots at drop boxes in Pennsylvania. The state’s Attorney General has released a statement strongly admonishing the campaign for this behavior. (NY Times)

Freedom House, a government-funded NGO, has published a report on the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting global internet freedom. (link)

Senators Markey and Hawley recently introduced legislation aimed at updating the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which includes provisions that would extend some of the protections to minors older than 13 years old. (Press Release)

A petition to legislate protection for minors online has reached the Indian Supreme Court, which reached out to the Central government for a response. (Hindustan Times)

The Irish Data Protection Commission is investigating Instagram (and parent company Facebook) for issues relating to the protection of information about minors. (Forbes)

China’s top legislative body has released a first draft of a Personal Information Protection Law. (Lexology)

China has also passed a new export control law which would allow it to take retaliatory steps in response to changes in export controls in other countries which would harm Chinese interests or national security. (Bloomberg)

Scholars at Stanford University’s Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence Institute published a working paper proposing a model to regulate and tax Big Tech companies. (Policy Brief)

(compiled by JSD Fellow Stav Zeitouni)

ILI Research Fellow Salome Viljoen wrote a piece for the Phenomenal World blog, critiquing ‘propertarian’ and ‘dignitarian’ approaches to data ownership. 

Google is providing data to law enforcement agencies based on keyword search warrants. Albert Fox Cahn of PRG and the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project ( S.T.O.P.) writes about the ensuing constitutional issues. 

Twitter amended policy which prevented users from posting links to a New York Post story about Hunter Biden. Company leadership explained that the platform was warning users about the “potentially unsafe” link because of a policy on the treatment of articles which are partially sourced in “hacked materials”. Facebook also limited the distribution of the article in its news feed, reportedly as part of their practice to give third-party fact-checkers time to review content. Glenn Greenwald criticizes both companies’ actions on The Intercept.

California’s Attorney General released a third set of proposed modifications to the text of California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).At the same time, Proposition 24 (the Consumer Personal Information Law and Agency Initiative) is on the ballot in California. Proposition 24 would expand or amend the CCPA, create the California Privacy Protection Agency, and remove the ability of businesses to fix violations before being penalized for violations.

The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University concluded their Data and Democracy symposium. Session videos are available online.

Watch out for upcoming events at the NYU Law Guarini Institute for Global Legal Studies, including talks from Anupam Chander, Frank Pasquale, Lina Khan, and Daphne Keller.

(Compiled by Student Fellow Margarita Boyarskaya.)

• The House Judiciary Committee released their 449-page report on competition in digital markets, largely concluding (at least on the Democrat side) that Big Tech should be broken up.  
  
• Sue Halpern wrote an excellent piece in The New Yorker on the data collection practices of the Trump administration’s 2020 re-election campaign app, which offers thoughtful reflections on data collection and privacy generally.

(compiled by JSD Fellow Katrina Geddes)

In California, a federal court started hearing arguments in the case between Epic Games, the company that created Fortnite, and Apple and Google. Briefly, Epic Games argues that the companies’ relative app stores broke antitrust laws buy levying high commission on in-app purchases.

The US Department of Commerce published a whitepaper that helps organizations determine that sending personal data to the US is legitimate.

The background for this whitepaper is an ECJ decision from July. That decision held that requires organizations that use EU-approved data transfer mechanisms to verify, on a case-by-case basis, whether foreign legal protections concerning government access to personal data meet EU standards.

Amazon introduced a new contact-less palm reading technology, their latest way to verify users’ identity. The company explains that the technology uses configurations of veins under the skin to evaluate multiple aspects of the palm and select the most distinct identifiers on a users’ palms in order to create a palm signature. Those signatures are then encrypted and stored on a unique cloud.

New York launched its contact-tracing app, aimed to hedge the spread of Covid-19. The state related to privacy concerns, explaining that the app is anonymous, uses Bluetooth technology rather than GPS tracking, and “doesn’t give any privacy information.”
Facebook has launched a new forecasting tool that allows users to posit questions about future events and crowdsource predictions about the outcome.

Finally, the House Judiciary Committee held another hearing to discuss strengthening antitrust laws, especially with regards to tech companies. 

(compiled by JSD Fellow Tomer Kenneth)

–       Amnesty International investigation reveals that three European tech companies based in France, Sweden and the Netherlands sold digital surveillance systems to China’s public security agencies with the risk of direct use in China’s mass surveillance programs. (Amnesty International)

–       Facebook plans to permit people to claim ownership over images and moderate where those images appear across the Facebook Platform, including Instagram. Where there are multiple claims over an image, Facebook will yield to who filed first and an appeal can be made using Facebook’s IP reporting forms. (The Verge)

–       Recent lawsuit filed last week against Facebook alleges that Apple’s iOS 14 software indicates the use of iPhone cameras by Instagram to spy on people. (CNET)

–       The SCALES-OKN (Systematic Content Analysis of Litigation EventS Open Knowledge Network) team plans to build an AI powered data platform over the next three years that enables access to court records and analytics. (Scales)

–       President Trump announces that the government is looking into concrete legal steps against social media sites that are censoring conservatives online and nudged Republicans to open their own investigations into the matter. (The Washington Post)

–       John Hancock partners with Amazon to integrate Amazon Halo with John Hancock’s life insurance for its Vitality customers. (Coverager)

–       Senate Committee revisits the need for federal data privacy legislation despite past failed attempts at same. (Compliance Week)

–       Subscribe to Surveillance technology Oversight Project YouTube channel here.

(compiled by JSD Fellow Ngozi Nwanta)