| Internet Governance FTC Announces Focus on Highly Sensitive Data: In a statement released this week, the Commission committed to “using the full scope of its legal authorities” to enforce the law against companies that engage in conduct that unlawfully “exploits Americans’ location, health, or other sensitive data.” |
| Privacy Ring Rejects Lawmaker’s Requests to Improve Privacy: After product testing revealed that the company’s doorbell video cameras are capable of capturing audio from a long range away from the devices, Senator Markey asked the company to disable audio recording by default. In its response, Ring rejected the request, as well as a request to not apply voice-recognition techniques to collected audio. |
| Information Security and Cyberthreats Hacker Purportedly Steals Data on One Billion Chinese Citizens from Shanghai Police: In a post on a popular hacker forum, the anonymous thief offered for sale 23 terabytes worth of “information on 1 Billion Chinese national residents and several billion case records, including: name, address, birthplace, national ID number, mobile number, all crime/case details.” The data was supposedly exposed on a non-password-protected Alibaba-powered dashboard, and Alibaba executives have been called for questioning in relation to the theft. |
| Intellectual Property YouTube Restores Popular “Lofi Girl” Channel in the Wake of “Abusive” Copyright Notices: The popular music channel was removed after being hit with Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notices that YouTube later determined were “false copyright strikes.” Although YouTube restored the channel, its operators used the incident to criticize YouTube’s system for reviewing copyright claims. |
| Freedom of Expression and Censorship TikTok to Deploy “Content Levels” To Protect Young Users from Inappropriate Content: The rating system, which is designed to function similarly to the rating systems used in film and video gaming, will shield content featuring “mature or complex themes” from users under 18. TikTok has not yet clarified its methodology for classifying content or applying rankings. |
| Practice Note Section 230 Doesn’t Shield Omegle in Child Predator Suit: The District of Oregon found that the chat service was not entitled to immunity for claims alleging that its defective design facilitated the matching of an eleven-year-old girl with a man who sexually abused her. |
| On the Lighter Side UK Court Allows Claimant to Serve Defendants Via NFT: In a case alleging that unknown defendants misappropriated a business owner’s cryptocurrency, the court allowed the claimant to serve process by sending an NFT of the pleadings to the crypto wallets into which he initially deposited the cryptocurrency. |
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| Ron Lazebnik Academic Director, Fordham CLIP Tom Norton Executive Director, Fordham CLIP |