In a decision dated September 23, 2011, the Court of Appeal of Caen suspended the implementation of a whistleblowing system that had been previously authorized by the French Data Protection Agency (CNIL) because, in the court’s view, the system infringed on the individual and collective rights and liberties of the company’s employees.
October 2011
The FTC Has Your Back, Even When It’s Naked: FTC Orders P2P Program’s Default File Sharing Settings Changed
FrostWire LLC (a P2P file-sharing software company) agreed to change the default privacy settings on its mobile and desktop applications and agreed to clearly disclose its applications’ content sharing options pursuant to a settlement agreement with the FTC which resulted from claims by the FTC that FrostWire’s content sharing practices violated the FTC Act.
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Ninth Circuit: ECPA Protects Stored Communications of Foreign Citizens
In a recent decision, the Ninth Circuit held that “the ECPA unambiguously applies to foreign citizens.” In Suzlon Energy Ltd. v. Microsoft, Suzlon Energy demanded Microsoft to produce emails from the Hotmail email account of an Indian citizen imprisoned abroad. The district court held that the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (“ECPA”) prohibited Microsoft from producing the documents even though the individual was not a U.S. citizen. The Ninth Circuit affirmed.
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ZIP-lined Out of Court: Williams-Sonoma Obtains Dismissal of New Jersey ZIP Code Collection Suit
On September 26, Judge William Walls of the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey ruled that a putative class action lawsuit against home goods retailer Williams-Sonoma failed to state a claim under New Jersey law. In Feder v. Williams-Sonoma Stores, Inc., the plaintiff sought damages for purported violations of New Jersey’s Truth-in-Consumer Contract, Warranty and Notice Act (“TCCWNA”) after a Williams-Sonoma employee allegedly required the plaintiff to provide her zip code as part of a credit card transaction. The district court’s decision supports what many people hope will continue to be the case, i.e., that it will be a challenge for plaintiffs’ lawyers to successfully transplant the California Supreme Court’s recent decision in Pineda v. Williams-Sonoma, Inc. (see our blog post here) into other jurisdictions.
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