During a much anticipated Open Commission Meeting announced by Commission Chair Lina M. Khan, the Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) voted in favor of issuing one new policy statement and one new report to Congress.
First, the Commission unanimously voted in favor of issuing a policy statement on FTC initiatives…
Qualifying businesses have another year to complying with certain, major provisions of the CCPA. The CCPA, or the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018, is a California law that gives California consumers, defined broadly to encompass all California residents, certain rights with respect to their personal information. Namely, it gives consumers the right to know about the personal information that businesses collect about them; the right to know what businesses do with that information; and, the right opt out of the sale of certain personal information if a business sells that personal information. In turn, qualifying businesses that do business in California must institute certain policies, practices, and methods that allow consumers to effectuate those rights.
On June 1, 2020, the California Attorney General’s office released the third and final set of CCPA proposed regulations (available here). Below, we provide information about the final proposed regulations and enforcement actions.
Ever on the forefront of consumer privacy protection, California is again making news in the privacy world with the California Attorney General’s recent publication of “Privacy on the Go: Recommendations for the Mobile Ecosystem,” which includes privacy recommendations for app developers, app platform providers, mobile ad networks, makers of operating systems and mobile carriers. With this publication, California joins the FTC and the GSMA as entities that have published non-binding guidance with respect to mobile privacy (which we blogged about here and here, respectively).
On February 22, 2012, California’s Attorney General, Kamala D. Harris, entered into an agreement with several leading providers of mobile devices and app stores to increase consumer privacy protection for mobile applications or “apps.” Under the agreement’s terms, these companies have agreed to redesign their app stores to provide a location for app developers to display their privacy policies.
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"Do I really have to obtain consent from all my customers to make a change to my privacy policy? No one else seems to be following that rule."
We get this question all the time. It is understandable, given that we often watch Web-based companies expand their usage of consumer data without the affirmative consent of their users. (In other words, they add a new offering to their service that expands their use or sharing of consumer data, and they default their users into the new offering.) Sometimes they back off temporarily when faced with media backlash or Congressional or regulatory scrutiny, but the pattern nonetheless persists in the long term. Sometimes we scratch our heads in wonder, since the FTC has taken the position in countless actions for over a decade that if you make a material, adverse, retroactive change to your privacy policy, you need to obtain consent from consumers to apply your new policy to the data you collected under your old policy.
When Flash cookies (also known as a “Local Shared Objects”) were first flagged as a privacy issue back in 2005, a few savvy companies added a disclosure about Flash cookies into their web site privacy policies. Since then, we have not heard the issue raised again. Now this sleeper issue seems to have been awakened by a recent report by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, entitled Flash Cookies and Privacy.
Flash cookies, which utilize a little-known capability of Adobe’s Flash plug-in, are a method to store information about a user’s preferences. (Estimates suggest that Adobe’s Flash software is installed on some 98 percent of personal computers.) Flash cookies may be used to provide better functionality to the user by, for example, storing the user’s preferences about sound volume or caching a music file for smoother play-back over an unreliable network connection. Flash cookies may also be used as unique identifiers that enable advertisers to track user preferences and circumvent deletion of HTTP cookies. Because Flash cookies are stored in a different location than HTTP cookies on one’s personal computer, simply erasing HTTP cookies, clearing browser history, or deleting the cache does not remove Flash cookies.
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