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Daily Archives: March 13, 2019

Understanding the Changing Landscape of Data Protection Laws

Klinkner, Blake, Understanding the Changing Landscape of Data Protection Laws (February 11, 2019). The Wyoming Lawyer, February 2019, at 44-45.. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3332687

“As businesses and other entities have sought to collect more personal data on individuals, the public has pushed back, and lawmakers throughout the United States and elsewhere have responded by passing data protection laws. Recent data protection laws passed by the European Union and by several states have already resulted in a number of lawsuits against businesses who handle personal data. Attorneys should become familiar with this changing legal landscape in order to best protect their clients, practices, and their own personal accounts. This article discusses recent legislation addressing data protection and data privacy, including the 2018 General Data Protection Regulation passed in the European Union, and the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018. This article next discusses how data protection and privacy laws will continue to evolve in the United States and elsewhere. This article concludes by providing recommendations for attorneys in adapting to the changing landscape of data protection and privacy laws.”

CRS addresses whether Congress will have access to Mueller’s report

Via FAS – The Special Counsel’s Report: Can Congress Get It? Michael A. Foster, Legislative Attorney; Todd Garvey, Legislative Attorney. March 8, 2019. “Recent media reports suggest that Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III is close to concluding his investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. As discussed in this separate Sidebar, Department of… Continue Reading

Millions of online photos scraped without consent

NBC News – People’s faces are being used without their permission, in order to power technology that could eventually be used to surveil them, legal experts say. “Facial recognition can log you into your iPhone, track criminals through crowds and identify loyal customers in stores. The technology — which is imperfect but improving rapidly —… Continue Reading

Google user data collection is extensive, massive and lucrative

Google Data Collection, Professor Douglas C. Schmidt, Vanderbilt University August 15, 2018: “Google is the world’s largest digital advertising company.1It also provides the #1 web browser, the #1 mobile platform,3and the #1 search engine4worldwide. Google’s video platform, email service, and map application have over 1 billion monthly active users each.5Google utilizes the tremendous reach of… Continue Reading

Trump’s Proposed Budget Would Devastate National Parks

Outside: A close reading of the President’s 2020 Department of the Interior budget reveals massive funding cuts for everything public-lands related—except for oil and gas “To understand any budget, all you need to see are the numbers. And when you look at the Trump administration’s 2020 budget proposal for the Department of the Interior, those numbers… Continue Reading

DuckDuckGo added to Google Chrome in more than 60 global markets

Techcrunch: Google has quietly added DuckDuckGo as a search engine option for Chrome users in ~60 markets – “In an update to the chromium engine, which underpins Google’s popular Chrome browser, the search giant has quietly updated the lists of default search engines it offers per market — expanding the choice of search product users… Continue Reading

NYT Archives – Reviews of Classic Books

The New York Times – Oops! Famously Scathing Reviews of Classic Books From The Times’s Archive: “What can we say? We don’t always get it right. Here’s a look back at some of our most memorable misses.We called “Sister Carrie” a book “one can get along very well without reading,” dismissed “Lolita” as “dull, dull,… Continue Reading

The Sky is NOT the Limit Anymore: Future Architecture of the Interplanetary Internet

The Sky is NOT the Limit Anymore: Future Architecture of the Interplanetary Internet. Ahmad ALHILAL, Tristan BRAUD and Pan HUI. 2 October 2018. “Fifty years after the Apollo program, space exploration has recently been regaining popularity thanks to missions with high media coverage. Future space exploration and space station missions will require specific networks to… Continue Reading

Free online course will arm you with tools and skills to navigate misinformation

The Knight Center – “Massive, country-wide protests are planned and it would be impossible to have correspondents placed at each demonstration. Like many newsrooms these days, you plan to comb social media for photo and video evidence that can provide a national picture of what’s going on. But how can you make sure the images… Continue Reading

White Collar Prosecutions Hit All-Time Low in January 2019

“The latest available data from the Justice Department show that during January 2019 the government reported 337 new white collar crime prosecutions – an historic low. According to the case-by-case information analyzed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University, this number is down 20.3 percent over the previous month, and continues a… Continue Reading

Specialists from seven countries call for moratorium on gene editing

Nature [no fee or paywall]: Adopt a moratorium on heritable genome editing, Eric Lander, Françoise Baylis, Feng Zhang, Emmanuelle Charpentier, Paul Berg and specialists from seven countries call for an international governance framework. “We call for a global moratorium on all clinical uses of human germline editing — that is, changing heritable DNA (in sperm,… Continue Reading

The Web is missing an essential part of infrastructure: an Open Web Index

The Web is missing an essential part of infrastructure: an Open Web Index – Dirk Lewandowski, Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, Hamburg, German. (Submitted on 9 Mar 2019). arXiv:1903.03846 [cs.IR] “A proposal for building an index of the Web that separates the infrastructure part of the search engine—the index—from the services part that will form… Continue Reading