Ace Your Midterms and Protect Your Privacy 📚🔒

Hey Everyone,

We know midterms are upon us, and we know that each of you are going to give it your all. If you need anything, do not be afraid to reach out! Have a great weekend.

Events:

General Body Meeting

Our general body is on Tuesday, March 19th, from 12:50 to 1:50 in WA220. There will be pizza. Come share with us what you want our club to help provide you.

General Body Meeting – New York Law Student Privacy Law Association

If you’re on our mailing list, you know that privacy law is where it’s at, and our general body meeting is where you’ll meet new and existing members, hear about upcoming privacy events and opportunities, and—perhaps most importantly—grab some free pizza!

Privacy in Analytics with Lauren Mihalakakos

Come hear Lauren Mihalakakos, a certified privacy expert, share about her work as the Senior Privacy Program Manager at Clarivate Plc. This event will be on Thursday, March 28th, from 12:50 to 1:50 in room W402.

Privacy in Analytics with Lauren Mihalakakos – New York Law Student Privacy Law Association

Who handles more data than anyone else? How about an analytics firm charged with making sense of the vast information sets of academic publishing and industry? Join us to hear from Lauren Mihalakakos (NYLS Class of 2021), Senior Privacy Program Manager at Clarivate Plc. Lauren’s role puts her in touch with data management concerns on a massive scale, including implications for regulatory compliance, intellectual property protections, and of course privacy

News:

Shopping apps have ears, coffee machines have eyes, and Google keeps trying to one-up its own past privacy infringements.

Temu class action

Some of you might know Temu as a famous infringer of IP belonging to a plethora of brands. Well, now they are being sued for allegedly collecting customer data that a shopping app has no need for, without any disclosure in their privacy policy. The suit alleges that text messages, biometric data, and network information, among other types of data, are being improperly collected by the app.

Popular online retailer Temu facing a class-action lawsuit in Illinois over data privacy concerns

Class-action lawsuits in Illinois and New York accuse Temu of collecting customer personal data without proper notification.

A warning before you go digital and discard the hard copies.

This is a warning. The blog author was trying to access an original document from 1990–but, unfortunately, modern software has trouble reading such an old file properly. This could a potential problem in the future, so while electronic files are useful and convenient, it is important we (securely) keep hard copies of certain documents.

The original WWW proposal is a Word for Macintosh 4.0 file from 1990, can we open it?

The W3C has a page with the original WWW proposal from Tim Berners-Lee. One of the downloads says The original document file (I think – I can’t test it).

Google settles for $350 for privacy leakage.

Google recently settled a lawsuit for $350 over its social network product, Google+ (if you didn’t know it existed, neither did I). Their systems had been exposing the data of millions of users to external companies, and Google never notified the public or it’s shareholders. This lawsuit was brought by investors. Meanwhile, a California court is still awaiting formal settlement documents regarding a separate, $5 billion case, which were expected to be presented last week.

Google settles $5 billion consumer privacy lawsuit

Alphabet’s Google has agreed to settle a lawsuit claiming it secretly tracked the internet use of millions of people who thought they were doing their browsing privately.

Coffee makers: unexpected surveillance tools

I don’t know about you, but before I’ve had coffee is not my preferred time to be photographed. A worker at an Amazon warehouse recently discovered pictures taken by a break room coffee machine; according to Amazon, the purpose of the camera in the machine was to process credit card purchases, but that raises more questions than it answers. The worker found the pictures just by clicking “Gallery” on the vending screen, so was the intent that credit card numbers would be viewable by all? Since when does credit card processing require a camera? Meanwhile, a coffee machine at a Canadian university was recently discovered to be employing facial recognition technology for the worthy goal of… targeted advertisements.

Coffee machine camera at Amazon warehouse raises concerns about surveillance in the workplace

A worker at the Amazon warehouse in Maple Grove accidentally discovered a camera in the break room coffee machine, raising concerns about surveillance.

Canadian university vending machine error reveals use of facial recognition

Snack dispenser at University of Waterloo shows facial recognition message on screen despite no prior indication

Best,
Jon Welgrin
Social Chair, Privacy Law Association
[email protected]
Please reach out with anything!