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Music.ly, now known as Tik Tok, an app popular with children and teenagers, settled a lawsuit with the FTC under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (“COPPA”) to the tune of $5.7 Million Dollars.  This sum is the largest civil penalty the FTC has ever obtained under COPPA. 
Continue Reading Popular Children’s App Music.ly Settles FTC COPPA Claims

On July 5, 2018, the EU Parliament passed a non-binding resolution encouraging the European Commission to suspend the EU-US Privacy Shield Program unless the US is fully compliant by September 1, 2018.  The EU Parliament believes that the current Privacy Shield program does not provide an adequate level of protection required by European law.  This comes roughly two years after the European Commission deemed the EU-US Privacy Shield Framework adequate to enable data transfers under EU law.  But a lot has changed in two years. 
Continue Reading EU Commission Recommends Suspension of Privacy Shield; Recent FTC Efforts May Be Too Little Too Late

In August, 2017, the Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) proposed a settlement agreement with Uber stemming from its investigation of a 2014 data breach due to Uber’s “unreasonable security practices”. The lengthy investigation found that Uber’s employees were accessing customer’s personal information, and that there were security lapses in Uber’s third-party cloud storage service. That settlement agreement required Uber to implement a “comprehensive privacy program”; however, the agreement was withdrawn by the FTC and amended recently. Why, you ask? Uber experienced a second data breach in 2016, while the investigation from the 2014 breach was well underway. The 2016 breach was a result of those same security lapses in the third-party cloud storage service and Uber waited over one year to report that second breach. Uber’s handling of the second breach continued its trail of misconduct, clearly demonstrating that the company had not learned its lesson.
Continue Reading Uber Goes 0-2 in Data Breach Notifications

Facebook is the subject of a recent media blitz due to the allegations that 50 million people had their information improperly disclosed to Cambridge Analytica, a data research firm that may have played a role in the 2016 election.

The premise of the allegations is that Cambridge Analytica sent out a personality test to roughly 270,000 of Facebook’s users, stating that it would use the test for academic purposes.  However, allegedly, Cambridge Analytica collected the personal information not only of those who replied to the survey, but also of all of those individuals’ Facebook “friends.”  By doing so, the 270,000 users extrapolated to 50 million users.
Continue Reading Facebook In Hot Water With Latest Privacy Missteps