- “Biometric Privacy Laws: How a Little-Known Illinois Law Made Facebook Illegal” [Jane Bambauer]
- Organized dentists work to block legal recognition of independent dental therapist practices [Mary Jordan, Washington Post]
- Some yearn to bring back Warren Court (or even more interventionist) antitrust doctrine. Just don’t [John McGinnis]
- “O’Neil is the Wang of Ireland” says apparel trademark disputant [Timothy Geigner, Techdirt]
- “Religious people should live under the same laws as everyone else” was a nice slogan while it lasted [Julie Zauzmer, Washington Post on nuns’ construction of chapel in field so as to block pipeline, plus resulting Twitter thread]
- “Therapy animals are everywhere, but proof that they help is not” [Karin Brulliard, Chicago Tribune]
Posts Tagged ‘privacy’
Great moments in police-union arguments
Court: smashing store surveillance cameras did not give Orange County, Calif. cops a “reasonable expectation of privacy” allowing them to exclude filmed evidence of their misconduct in the store afterward. [Lowering the Bar, earlier]
Privacy and the common law
More regulation and legislation to protect privacy from a snooping press? “The common law is able to deal more flexibly with the questions that arise,” says Hofstra law professor Irina Manta [Federalist Society video]
UPS didn’t ask questions about volume shipments from Indian reservations
“A federal judge on Thursday ordered delivery giant UPS Inc. to pay New York City and the state nearly $247 million in damages and penalties for illegally shipping cigarettes” to New York buyers from Indian reservations. “UPS argued it followed the rules and can only do so much to police what its 1.6 million daily shippers send in sealed packages.” The delivery service says the shipments accounted for about $1 million in revenue. [AP/New York Post]
“Know-your-customer” meets the trafficking panic
According to a British think tank report, one unnamed British bank has been “monitoring” its customers’ accounts for possible indications of involvement in prostitution, among them “payments to ‘high end restaurants and cheap diners on the same day’ in the belief that such transactions could indicate a sex worker dining with a client while her ‘handler’ eats more frugally nearby.” Another bank cooperating with authorities is looking for daily payments to drugstores “that might indicate repeated purchases of contraceptives.” [Martin Bentham/Evening Standard, Elizabeth Nolan Brown/Reason, Tom Keatinge and Anne-Marie Barry/Royal United Services Institute on bank cooperation with law enforcement] More on bank privacy here.
In other news of governments’ war on financial privacy, the Internal Revenue Service has demanded transaction and customer records for U.S. customers of Bitcoin exchange Coinbase [Jacob Gershman, WSJ]
Great moments in privacy
After a Saturday evening incident in which 40 to 60 teenagers invaded an Oakland, Calif. rapid transit station, robbing and beating riders, a spokesman for BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) says surveillance videos of the flash-mob robbery will not be made public because people committing crimes appear to be minors. [Demian Bulwa and Michael Cabanatuan, San Francisco Chronicle via Ann Althouse]
They’ll be watching you (and your kibble purchases)
King County (Seattle) uses grocery loyalty card data to figure out who owns pets, according to a new report from local station KOMO. It then sends them letters warning of a $250 fine if they do not license the animals. The “county said they pay the company who pays stores such as Safeway …for access to customer data contained in every one of those reward card swipes.” And “the mailers work. Just last year they brought in more than $100,000 in new pet licenses.”
But remember, government needs access to Big Data to fight terrorism. [cross-posted from Cato at Liberty]
Litigation roundup
- House passes Stop Settlement Slush Funds Act of 2016 [James DeLong, Rep. Bob Goodlatte, Republican Policy Committee, earlier]
- “Enough is enough”: judge in surgical-mesh case decries tactical angling in multidistrict litigation (MDL) process, reminds lawyers of sanctions authority [Glenn Lammi, Washington Legal Foundation] Related: “Repeat Players in Multidistrict Litigation” [Elizabeth Chamblee Burch, Mass Tort Prof]
- E-mail scanning: “So-called ‘privacy lawsuits’ that essentially enrich a cottage industry of plaintiffs’ lawyers…” [David Kravets, ArsTechnica]
- GM, 3-for-3 at winning ignition-switch trials, settles a couple of bellwether cases [Margaret Cronin Fisk and Laurel Brubaker Calkins, AP/Walla Walla, Wash. Union-Bulletin, CarScoops]
- New Jersey judge disallows plaintiff’s experts’ “made for litigation” methods in talcum powder case [Michele Barnes and Clifton Hutchinson, K&L Gates]
- “Lawyers Suing Lawyers: Texas mass tort attorney sues other mass tort attorney over robocall recruitment tactic” [U.S. Chamber Institute for Legal Reform]
Privacy laws and client-chasing attorneys
Ohio’s FOIA/public records law guards the privacy of workers comp claimants, but with an exception for journalists. Lawyers hire journalist to dredge names. Legal? [John O’Brien, Legal NewsLine/Forbes] Lawyers have sued for direct access to the lists [ABA Journal]
Yet more on champerty, maintenance, and media liability
Davey Alba and Jennifer Chaussee at Wired quote me on Peter Thiel’s financing of the Hulk Hogan lawsuit as part of a campaign to take down Gawker Media (earlier here, here). The episode, which follows Frank VanderSloot’s announcement that he wishes to devote $1 million to endowing a fund for lawsuits against the “liberal press,” is likely not to be the last such, and I speculate on a nightmare scenario in which multiple clearinghouses claiming the public interest banner (and presumably based on tax-deductible donations) get up and running with the objective of taking down various sectors of the press disliked by one group or another.
Related: I’m a bit surprised that the successful legal takedown of the tawdry 1950s-era Confidential magazine, told in Henry Scott’s book Shocking True Story, hasn’t figured in more Gawker coverage. Megan McArdle at Bloomberg View weighs in on various aspects of the Thiel/Hogan story, and as usual is worth reading. Max Kennerly has a detailed analysis of legal issues in the coming Hogan v. Gawker appeal [earlier on verdict] And a flashback: how the late Lehman Brothers got in a ton of trouble by dabbling in champerty.