Days after suing five TV companies for spying on consumers and recording what they watch, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) said Wednesday he had secured a temporary restraining order (TRO) against one of them, Hisense, to stop it from collecting personal data. Meanwhile, an attorney said Texas' action highlighted regulation of smart connected devices like TVs, which have become surveillance tools. Another said resulting fines against the companies could be significant.
Privacy law, particularly in the U.S., is “increasingly bad” for consumers and companies, said WilmerHale’s Kirk Nahra during a Practising Law Institute (PLI) event Wednesday.
Despite some federal statutes and many state laws specific to privacy, the FTC acts as a stand-in for the lack of a comprehensive federal privacy measure, said the agency's former chief privacy officer at a Practising Law Institute (PLI) event Wednesday. Besides state privacy laws, enforcers often employ unfair and deceptive acts and practices (UDAP) statutes and other consumer protection laws, another panelist said.
A federal court permanently blocked a Louisiana law that would require age verification before a user could access social media platforms Monday, ruling that it violated the First Amendment. The decision Monday was a win for NetChoice, which sued the state over the statute in March claiming free speech violations and privacy risks (see 2503180048).
Some supported a Texas app store age-verification law, while others criticized its constitutionality and regulatory hurdles in amicus briefs filed last week at the U.S. District Court for Western Texas (case 1:25-cv-01660).
Introducing privacy to young children may help empower them to continue to assert their right to it as they grow older, author and academic Lorrie Cranor told Privacy Daily in an interview. A professor of security and privacy technologies at Carnegie Mellon, Cranor recently wrote a children's book, Privacy, Please!
Though age gating is increasingly prevalent, laws regulating it vary widely from state to state, and courts haven't fully addressed their legality, said Corynne McSherry, legal director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).
Privacy professionals expected more states to enact comprehensive privacy laws this year, but none of the bills introduced this year crossed the finish line, they said Thursday on a TrustArc webinar. Instead, states passed narrowly tailored privacy legislation or amendments to existing laws. In addition, several court decisions and enforcement actions drilled deep into top privacy issues, the privacy pros said.
As lawsuits over tracking technologies increase rapidly, some courts have managed to narrow the scope of older statutes, countering the litigation wave, said panelists during an Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) webinar Wednesday. But other courts remain split on the reach of these laws, they added.
Instacart offers various prices to different customers for the exact same product, according to an independent study by Groundwork Collaborative, Consumer Reports and More Perfect Union. In an email to Privacy Daily, Instacart rejected the study's assertions that it uses personal, demographic and other data to set online prices.