The U.S. Supreme Court denied a petition to review a case that claimed Facebook allegedly violated privacy and wiretapping laws by tracking users’ internet activity after they exited the social media platform. The ruling rejected questions proposed by an objector to the $90 million settlement in the case relating to the attorney fees and plaintiff service awards.
Class action lawsuits surrounding cybersecurity breaches have risen significantly in recent years and 2024 was no exception, lawyers said during a Practising Law Institute event Thursday. Speakers discussed trends from 2024 concerning litigation about data privacy, cybersecurity breaches and the Telephone Consumer Privacy Act.
Virtual private networks, or VPNs, aren't the effective loopholes to age-verification laws that many think they are, Electronic Frontier Foundation staff said in a blog post Friday. Currently, 19 states have laws that require age verification before a user can access sites containing adult content, said bloggers Paige Collings, EFF senior speech and privacy activist, and Rindala Alajaji, EFF legislative activist.
New technologies such as the use of pixels have led to a surge -- beginning in 2022 -- of litigation involving older privacy laws because newer legislation lacks a private right of action, privacy lawyers said during a webinar Wednesday.
Privacy laws in the EU and at the state level in the U.S. serve as a basis for building an AI regulation regime, Morrison Foerster’s Marian Waldmann Agarwal and Marijn Storm said during a webinar about the intersection of privacy and AI last week. The partners discussed recent AI regulatory developments and their intersection with privacy obligations.
State privacy laws offer Californians broad AI protection, said Attorney General Rob Bonta (D) in legal guidance released Monday.
The number of cases alleging violations of the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act has risen in recent years and seems likely to continue to grow after an October decision by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, privacy lawyers said in interviews. The VPPA was intended to protect the privacy of an individual’s video store rentals. However, in the past decade or so, its reach has widened to include streaming services, said Matthew Wolfe, a Shook Hardy privacy attorney.
Twenty-five privacy decisions from October to December show a significant uptick in the number of pixel-based court rulings on wiretapping issued nationwide, according to Husch Blackwell’s Dustin Taylor and Owen Davis in their monthly data privacy litigation report Monday. Ten of the decisions cited in the report were about pixel-wiretapping decisions: four on chat-wiretapping decisions, four on secure reliable transport-wiretapping, five on pen registry/tap and trace decisions and two on Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA) decisions.
New York state legislators opened their 2025 session Wednesday, introducing comprehensive and healthcare-focused privacy bills, among other measures related to consumer data. Assemblymember Nily Rozic (D) offered the 2025 version of the New York Privacy Act. However, some of it is "not aligned with other comprehensive privacy laws,” which could make compliance a challenge for businesses, warned Hinshaw & Culbertson privacy attorney Cathy Mulrow-Peattie in an email Wednesday.
GameStop and the plaintiffs in a class-action suit alleging violation of the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA) agreed to dismiss the lawsuit, the parties announced in a joint stipulation of dismissal at U.S. District Court of New York Monday.