Trade association NetChoice asked the U.S. District Court for Middle Tennessee on Thursday to follow the lead of the decision in NetChoice v. Yost and order a preliminary injunction on a law that requires age verification before a person can access social media. The Yost case, decided Wednesday, enjoined an Ohio law requiring age verification on First Amendment grounds (see 2504160049).
President Donald Trump’s recent firings of FTC commissioners were illegal and undermine bipartisan work on privacy enforcement, a coalition of Democratic state attorneys general wrote Friday in an amicus brief.
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) said Thursday that DOGE employees' access to sensitive personal data didn't violate the 1974 Privacy Act. The government units presented their arguments in an answer to a complaint from the American Federation of Government Employees as part of a case the union brought against them. They then asked the court to dismiss the case with prejudice.
The U.S. District Court for Northern California ruled on Friday that social media platform X's copyright case against a data-scraping company will continue, and it allowed some but not all of data scraper Bright Data's counterclaims to continue as well. "The scraper states plausible claims for relief," the court said.
Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch (R) said the decision in the recent NetChoice, LLC v. Griffin case does not apply to her state's current case against the trade association about a kids online safety law, in a letter to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Tuesday. Earlier this month, trade association NetChoice suggested the 5th Circuit follow the ruling in Griffin and enjoin the Mississippi law, which is at the heart of NetChoice v. Fitch.
The Privacy Act includes cybersecurity provisions that can be used to hold the Department of Government Efficiency liable for data abuse, Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Mario Trujillo said Thursday.
The University of California Student Association dismissed its case against the Department of Education and Education Secretary Linda McMahon concerning the Department of Government Efficiency's access to sensitive information Wednesday. McMahon had filed a motion to dismiss the case April 8 over lack of standing and the association's inability to show irreparable harm (see 2504080051). The student association had sued the Education Department in February in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia for its alleged unlawful and continuous disclosure of sensitive information to DOGE (see 2502100074).
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier (R) issued a subpoena to Roblox Wednesday for information about how the online game markets to children, moderates chat rooms and sets age-verification requirements, as well as how it collects and processes data of child users.
Dozens of states urged a federal court to appoint a consumer privacy ombudsman to oversee data protection issues in 23andMe’s bankruptcy sale (see 2504100046). Florida, New York, California and Utah were among states seeking an ombudsman.
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the U.S. Treasury Department and the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) filed a motion to dismiss a case about DOGE's allegedly illegal seizure of personnel records and payment system data, claiming that the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) lacked standing to sue, among other issues.