Protenus has released its July Breach Barometer, with data
supplied by DataBreaches.net. Here’s a
snippet from their report:
July is the first month in 2017 to have hacking incidents
outweigh insider breaches to patient data in both frequency and number of
affected patient records. While hacking
accounted for almost half of total breach incidents this month, the severity
and potential damage of insider threats to patient data should not be
overlooked, with one incident going
undetected for 14 years.
I’ll be very curious to see how my Indian students
react. (and if all my other students are
jealous!)
India’s Supreme Court says privacy is a fundamental right in
blow to government
NEW DELHI — In a blow to the
Indian government’s efforts to roll out the world’s biggest biometric database
on its billion citizens, India’s Supreme Court ruled Thursday that privacy was
a fundamental right for people.
Over the past few years, the government has aggressively
pushed to compile the database, known as Aadhar, by sending officials out to
remote villages to take iris scans and fingerprints. To ensure complete enrollment, the government
this year put out several notices restricting access to essential government
services for those not part of the system.
The unanimous ruling by the nine-judge bench will have
huge implications in a number of ongoing cases involving Aadhar, which means
base or foundation in Hindi.
It could
put an end to the government’s efforts of making enrollment mandatory.
It also guarantees privacy for Indian
citizens as an intrinsic right — removing it could have had far reaching
implications beyond biometric IDs for the daily lives of Indians such as the
possible decriminalization of homosexuality.
… In court, government lawyers argued that the
right of all citizens to a dignified life was more important than the elitist
preoccupation with privacy.
(On the other hand).
Joe Cadillic writes:
The TSA is winning the war on
Americans minds as commuters are being tricked into giving away their rights
without a fight.
The above video warns that facial
recognition body scanners are coming to a train station near you…
Last week, the TSA Los
Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority ‘voluntarily’ asked commuters to
walk through facial recognition body scanners before being allowed to board a
train.
Read more on MassPrivateI.
This technology is evolving and improving. How long before a smartphone App can identify
anyone you video?
Wherever you go, your face exposes you. Facial recognition in combination with surveillance cameras
is a powerful tool that can track your every step.
Search engines are becoming ever smarter in managing
massive amounts of data. Face search and
facial recognition are just a few of many tools that target individuals. All public data combined, they can quickly
unravel what an individual has been up to.
Compare and contrast.
Li, Tiffany and Bronfman, Jill and Zhou, Zhou, Saving
Face: Unfolding the Screen of Chinese Privacy Law (August 2017). Journal of
Law, Information, and Science (Forthcoming). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2826087
Abstract
Privacy is often a subjective
value, taking on meaning from specific social, historical, and cultural
contexts. Western privacy scholars have
so far generally limited academic study to focus on Western ideals of privacy. However, privacy – or some notion of it – can
be found in almost every culture and every nation, including the growing
economic powerhouse that is the People’s Republic of China. Focusing on China as a case study of
non-Western privacy norms is important today, given the rapid rise of the
Chinese economy and its corresponding impact on worldwide cultural norms and
law. Simply put, it is naïve to believe
that privacy law will develop in the near future without the influence of
China.
… Given the long-arm reach of many nations’
privacy laws (particularly the EU’s current and proposed regulations), several
signs indicate that China may follow the EU’s example in enforcing its privacy
laws worldwide.
… This paper will attempt to illuminate the
state of privacy law in China, by evaluating current legal developments,
exploring cultural and historical perceptions of privacy, and analyzing how
China’s unique perceptions of privacy may influence the future development of
new norms in China’s growing privacy regime.
What command turns it off?
Margi Murphy reports:
If you own an Android phone, it’s
likely that you’ve used Google’s Assistant, which is similar to Apple’s Siri.
Google says it only turns on and
begins recording when you utter the words “OK Google”.
But a Sun investigation has found
that the virtual assistant is a little hard of hearing.
In some cases, just saying “OK” in conversation prompted it to switch on
your phone and record around 20 seconds of audio.
Read more on The
Sun.
[From the
article:
Once Google is done recording, it uploads the audio files
to its computer servers - often dubbed "the cloud".
These files are accessible from absolutely anywhere in the
world - as long as you have an internet connection.
That means any device that is signed into your personal
Gmail or Google account can access the library of your deepest, darkest
secrets.
So if you're on a laptop right now and signed into Gmail -
you could have a listen.
[Step by step instructions follow. Bob]
Lawyers 1, victims 0? (Google victorious for a mere $8.5 million?)
Helen Christophi reports:
The Ninth Circuit agreed Tuesday
that Google can settle privacy claims by giving $8.5 million to six nonprofit
privacy organizations instead of class members, despite ties between the
organizations, Google and class counsel.
The three-judge appeals panel
found that U.S. District Judge Edward Davila did not abuse his discretion by
approving the cy pres settlement, almost half of which went to the alma maters
of class counsel, and another chunk to organizations to which Google regularly
donates or which received Google settlement funds in the past.
Read more on Courthouse
News. EPIC’s
comments on the opinion are not surprising:
A divided federal appeals court
has upheld a decision that allows Google to continue consumer
privacy violations by means of a collusive settlement. Though
the case concerns Google’s illegal disclosure of personal data from 129 million
consumers, the settlement fails to compensate those consumers, does nothing to change Google’s business practices,
and diverts funds to organizations that don’t protect consumer privacy. The dissenting judge wrote that the settlement
“raises a red flag” because “47% of the settlement fund is being donated to the
alma maters of class counsel.” EPIC twice urged the lower court to reject the settlement, arguing
that it did nothing for class members and would allow Google to “continue to
engage in the privacy-invading practice.” EPIC has long urged courts to reject collusive
settlements and has proposed objective criteria for courts to follow in class action
cases.
The swing of the pendulum.
Again.
Eversheds Sutherland reports:
In a decision surely welcomed by
the plaintiffs’ bar, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held, on
August 15, 2017, that a putative class action plaintiff has Article III
standing as long as the plaintiff alleges
just slightly more than a mere statutory violation. The case, Robins v. Spokeo, was on
remand from the United States Supreme Court following that Court’s well-known
May 2016 Spokeo v. Robins decision, which held that
allegations of a statutory violation of the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA),
without more, did not confer standing. A
three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit has now ruled that, as a matter of
statutory interpretation, the FCRA procedures at issue were crafted to protect
consumers’ “concrete” interest in accurate credit reporting about themselves,
and that the plaintiff’s allegations of inaccurate credit reports could be
deemed “a real harm” sufficient to confer standing.
Read more on JD
Supra.
Perspective.
The bad news keeps coming for Wells Fargo. A nearly $150 million settlement is pending for the
fake-account scandal that roiled the bank last year, and a new scandal has
emerged: Recently it has been alleged that thousands of customers were signed
up for insurance without their knowledge. A bevy of lawsuits is in the pipeline, and regulatory scrutiny is intensifying. Meanwhile, one of Well Fargo’s
chief competitors, Bank of America, has been relatively scandal free, with
impressive revenue and profit results for the first half of 2017.
What explains the divergence in the
fortunes of two of the U.S.’s largest banks?
One possibility is the tone at the top. For the past several years, Wells Fargo has
been run by MBAs, while Bank of America’s CEO since 2010, Brian Moynihan, has a
law degree from Notre Dame. Might this
difference in education influence how CEOs behave when it comes to setting a
course and trimming corporate sails? After
all, there’s a subtle difference in how these two disciplines train people to
understand and manage risks: Legal
training focuses on the downside of particular actions, while business training
may emphasize the upsides for shareholder value from risk taking.
… The most obvious
impact a lawyer CEO might be expected to have is on the amount of litigation
their company is involved in. We looked
at over 70,000 lawsuits filed against our sample of firms in federal courts
during those 10 years. We focused
on nine common types of corporate litigation: antitrust, employment civil
rights, contract, environmental, intellectual property, labor, personal injury,
product liability, and securities.
The result was clear: Firms run
by CEOs with legal expertise were associated with much less corporate
litigation. Compared with the
average company, lawyer-run firms experienced 16% to 74% less litigation,
depending on the litigation type. Employment
civil rights, antitrust, and securities lawsuits were reduced the most, while
contract saw the smallest (but still significant) reduction with a lawyer
CEO. The results were economically
meaningful, since the reduction was several fewer suits per year in some cases.
Dr. Google?
Google search uses a medical quiz to help diagnose depression
Only half of Americans who face
depression get help for it, and Google is determined to increase that
percentage. As of today, it's offering
a medically validated, anonymous screening questionnaire for clinical
depression if you search for information on the condition. This won't definitively indicate that you're
clinically depressed, to be clear, but it will give you useful information you
can take to a doctor.
For my Digital Forensics students. Possible project?
Search tools & Techniques.
You mean Grammar is useful? My students will be astonished!
Elementary English Grammar for Lawyers
by on
Campbell, Joseph Charles, Elementary English Grammar for
Lawyers (July 30, 2017). Sydney Law School Research Paper No. 17/62. Available
at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3011086
“A lawyer interpreting a text whose meaning is disputed –
whether a statute or some other document that has effect in public law, or a
document like a contract or a will that has effect in private law – must be
able to articulate why it is possible that the text has more than one meaning,
and why one of those meanings is preferable to another. An important aid for performing those tasks is
the conceptual apparatus of English grammar. This paper, written as an aid for students of
legal interpretation, outlines
some fundamentals of English grammar, and shows, via numerous examples, how the
courts have used the language of grammar in solving problems of
interpretation.”
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