On December 1, 2022, the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued a Bulletin to highlight the obligations of HIPAA-covered entities and business associates when using “online tracking technologies,” or what OCR describes as “script or code on a website or mobile
data collection
Amazon’s Recent Acquisitions Highlight the Value of Consumer Data (and the Evolving Privacy Issues)
By Ryan P. Blaney, Danielle Brooks & Jonathan Mollod on
Roughly two weeks apart, on July 21, 2022 and August 5, 2022, respectively, Amazon made headlines for agreeing to acquire One Medical, “a human-centered and technology-powered primary care organization,” for approximately $3.9 billion and iRobot, a global consumer robot company, known for its creation of the Roomba vacuum…
FTC Seeks to Move Beyond Notice and Consent to Restrict Data Collection and Use
By Amy Gordon & Ryan P. Blaney on
The FTC indicated that it will use its rulemaking authority under the FTC Act’s Section 18 to create a new rule that will likely seek to rein in broad data collection and use.
In October 2021, FTC Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter made two speeches in which she expressed a desire to move beyond the FTC’s “notice-and-consent” framework to address broader surveillance practices that underlie the digital advertising economy, specifically by applying “bright-line purpose and use restrictions that minimize the data that can be collected and how it can be deployed.”
The Future of the FTC: Part I
By Ryan P. Blaney & Brooke Gottlieb on
On January 21, 2021, President Biden designated Federal Trade Commission (the “FTC”) Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter as acting chair of the FTC. Soon thereafter in one of her first speeches in her new role, Chairwoman Slaughter announced two substantive areas of priority for the FTC – the COVID-19 pandemic and racial equity.
French DPA Issues Guidance Surrounding Practice of Web Scraping
On April 30, 2020, the French data protection authority, the CNIL, published a guidance surrounding considerations behind what it calls “commercial prospecting,” meaning scraping publicly available website data to obtain individuals’ contact info for purposes of selling such data to third parties for direct marketing purposes. The guidance is significant in two respects. First, it speaks to the CNIL’s view of this activity in the context of the GDPR and privacy concerns. Second, beyond the context of direct marketing related privacy issues, the guidance lays out some guiding principles for companies that conduct screen scraping activities or hire outside vendors to collect and package such data.