Tag Archives: consumer

It took three days, but I finally found a panel at BIO 2018 that addressed the current challenges in privacy and security regarding health data.  This panel, Realizing the Potential of Clinical and Consumer Genomics, was focused on all the new genetic tests that are available (with more to come) and all the genetic data those tests are generating.  I was particularly impressed with the approach of Mindstrong Health to privacy and security,… More

On Friday, May 25, the day when GDPR became effective, noyb.eu (None of Your Business), the non-profit privacy organization recently set up by Max Schrems, filed the first complaints based on GDPR.

Max Schrems is the Austrian privacy lawyer who had complained about the transfer of his data to the United States by Facebook:  he argued that, in light of the Snowden revelations,… More

Recently, Austrian privacy activist Maximilian Schrems won a partial victory in his continuing battles with Facebook. We discuss that case below. But first, we review his prior tilts with Facebook.

Schrems in Ireland’s Courts

When Schrems was a college student, he heard a Facebook representative at a conference talk about European privacy rules with a lack of consideration that shocked him. Since then, Schrems has been fighting Facebook on many fronts.… More

As most are aware, the Massachusetts Attorney General has won the race to the courthouse and been the first regulator to file suit against Equifax.

• The 28 page complaint is summed up on paragraph 4:Consumers do not choose to give their private information to Equifax, and they do not have any reasonable manner of preventing Equifax from collecting, processing, using, or disclosing it. Equifax largely controls how,…

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Me and 143 million of my closest friends may have had our personal information inappropriately accessed through a breach at Equifax–is there no safe haven anywhere?  Deferring that question for another day, here are the instructions from the FTC on how to check if your data is implicated.  The first time I tried, I could not access the site:

I waited an hour and went back to the site. … More

In the 9th Circuit’s August 15, 2017 decision in Robins v. Spokeo, the latest in the long-running legal debate about when a consumer cause of action exists for a data breach, the 9th Circuit has declared that inaccuracies in a published credit report may sometimes constitute a “concrete injury” sufficient to confer Article III standing. This is a significant win for consumer protection advocates,… More

What is the future of data privacy regulation in Massachusetts?

On March 24, 2016, the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office gave us a glimpse. In collaboration with Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and MIT’s Internet Policy Research Initiative and Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the AG’s Office convened a “Forum on Data Privacy.”  In this first-of-its-kind conference,… More

Today, Wyndham and the FTC settled the enforcement action brought by the FTC that had led to a significant decision by the Third Circuit in August of this year.  (Wyndham’s statement on the settlement can be found here; the FTC’s statement can be found here; my earlier analysis of the Third Circuit’s decision can be found here.)  While the details of the settlement are interesting in their own right – Wyndham will not be paying anything by way of a fine or monetary damages and is not required to admit liability,… More

By Martha Coakley and Jon Hurst

This entry originally ran as an op-ed in the September 25, 2015 edition of The Boston Globe.

Hardly a week goes by without a news report of a new cyberattack. As any consumer affected by fraud knows, the harm is real. The  impact on businesses, government, and other targets is also real,… More

Over one year ago, our colleague Chris Hart argued that the District of New Jersey court’s decision in FTC v. Wyndham Worldwide Corp. et. al., No. 13-1887-ES, “point[ed] to the possibility that the FTC has potentially broad power, and a far reach, to bring actions for data breaches as a general matter.” That possibility became substantially more concrete this week,… More