Following the enactment of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”), which went into effect on May 25, 2018, Google has now been fined heavily for violations of the law. On January 21, 2019, the Commission nationale de l’informatique et des libertés (“CNIL”), the French data privacy authority, fined Google €50 million (approximately U.S. $57 million) for violating the GDPR because it did not properly ask its users for consent to use their data to personalize advertising and because the company makes it too hard for users to find out how their personal information is used and how long that information is stored. This is the largest financial penalty for a privacy breach in Europe.
Online businesses that interact with the EU need to carefully examine their practice to be sure that they are either not triggering EU Data Protection requirements or are in compliance therewith.
By William MacDonald*
Yesterday Connecticut Attorney General George Jepsen announced a $7 million settlement with Google over its unauthorized collection of data from unsecured wireless networks nationwide through Google's Street View vehicles.
On February 1, 2013, the FTC released its latest privacy-focused report, Mobile Privacy Disclosures: Building Trust Through Transparency.
In recent days, numerous Facebook users have posted a legal-sounding statement as an update to their pages containing some version of the following:
Lustigman Firm attorneys Andrew Lustigman and Jonathan I. Ezor were recently featured in two Mobile Marketer articles by Chantal Tode about cases brought against Google involving smartphone privacy and data collection.