Internet Governance
Uber Will Treat Its UK Drivers As “Workers” While Spain Plans To Grant Gig Economy Drivers Employee Rights: Following a UK Supreme Court decision that categorized 25 former Uber drivers as “workers”—a unique classification that grants entitlements to some, but not all of the rights of employees—Uber says that it will now classify all of its drivers with the same status, entitling them to employment benefits such as minimum wage guarantees; similarly, Spain will likely become the world’s first country to formally give gig economy delivery drivers employee rights.
Privacy
French Competition Watchdog Rejects Request To Stall Apple’s iOS 14 Privacy Protections: France’s competition authority rejected a request from online advertising lobby groups to delay the implementation of Apple’s anti-tracking controls on iOS14 on the basis that the authority did not view the privacy update as an abusive practice; however, the watchdog announced that it will still continue to investigate whether the tech company’s transparency updates give it an unfair advantage.
California Approves New Regulations Under CCPA To Prohibit The Use Of “Dark Patterns”: The State approved regulations designed to strengthen consumer protections under the California Consumer Privacy Act by prohibiting websites from employing “confusing language or unnecessary steps” to thwart users from exercising their data privacy rights under the Act.
Information Security & Cyberthreats
Hackers Robbed Thousands Of Dollars From NFT Art Collectors: Numerous users of Nifty Gateway, an NFT digital art marketplace, claimed that their accounts were hacked to purchase thousands of dollars worth of artwork and that they had been robbed of their existing art collection.
Intellectual Property
Wikipedia Hopes To Charge Big Tech For Using Its Content: Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that runs Wikipedia, will offer tech companies such as Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon a paid service for accessing and re-publishing content from Wikipedia’s public database.
Free Expression & Censorship
Big Tech Combats COVID-19 Ads And Vaccine Misinformation: Through improving its automated detection technology and implementing new misinformation policies, Google has blocked more than 99 million fake COVID-19 ads on topics ranging from vaccine doses to counterfeit N95 masks; similarly, in its fight to remove misleading anti-vaccine theories, Facebook data scientists found that half of the most “vaccine-hesitant” posts on the platform can be attributed to merely 111 accounts.
Practice Note
Second Circuit Affirms That Vimeo Is Immune From Suit For Banning Account: The court affirmed dismissal of a suit brought by a pastor whose account was banned for promoting conversion therapy, reasoning that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act immunized Vimeo for its good-faith restriction of objectionable content.
On the Lighter Side
A New Tool Will Help You Self-Sabotage Zoom Meetings: If you need an excuse to escape your next Zoom call, this free web widget will let you add a variety of distracting effects to your audio feed, such as echoes, crying babies, barking dogs, and weeping.
Olivier Sylvain
Academic Director, Fordham CLIP
Tom Norton
Executive Director, Fordham CLIP
Erica Chan
Junyi Cui
Editorial Fellows