Google announced last week the launch of a new feature that allows its users to plan for what happens to their accounts when they die or can no longer use their account.  The feature, called Interactive Account Manager, allows users to set a “timeout period” of inactivity.  Google will send an alert one month before [...]

At the end of February, Google and Spain’s data protection authority, the Spanish Data Protection Agency (AEPD), came head-to-head in the European Court of Justice. As European data protection efforts continue to zero in on search engines, this will be one of the most hotly anticipated decisions around the world (for those of us interested [...]

Google recently released their transparency report detailing information regarding government requests for Google users’ data. It contains some interesting information, including Google’s compliance rates. Although Google still complies with most government requests the percentage has declined a little from one year ago. Most of the requests Google gets are under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. [...]

Smart phones, social media and technology in general have all advanced immensely in recent years, and with this forward movement expectations about data privacy and the law regulating it, have been left behind. The controversy came to a head after pressure mounted on the Federal Trade Commission to update the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Acts [...]

A California federal court has dismissed a class action lawsuit wherein plaintiffs, Pandora users, claimed that a 2010 partnership between Facebook and Pandora caused details of their transactions to be disclosed. While the lawsuit was initially thought to open up many privacy issues for the music streaming service, Judge Armstrong ultimately decided that “no actual [...]

A day in the life of Kate Middleton: enjoying royal teatime, lavish vacationing, watching a polo match, going topless. Oh, and getting caught.  On Friday, September 14, 2012, a French gossip magazine disrupted Ms. Middleton’s royal affairs with the publication of topless photographs taken by paparazzi. Shortly after (within hours) the princess’s physique went viral, [...]

The NYPD successfully challenged Twitter’s refusal to turn over account information for a user who threatened to carry out a mass shooting like the one in Colorado. Twitter initially declined, arguing that the threats were not specific enough to fit their privacy policy’s emergency exception. The court disagreed, issuing a subpoena to help the police [...]

According to a recent CNET article, experts are in disagreement about whether the law permits the interception of personal communication over an unencrypted WiFi network. If unencrypted (no password protection), the content of the communications may not be covered under the federal wiretap statute, which only protects communication that is not “ready accessible to the [...]

In an interesting turn in the ever-growing realm of e-discovery, a Manhattan Criminal Court Judge Matthew A. Sciarrino, Jr., held that Twitter, Inc., must turn over tweets subpoenaed by prosecutors in a case against an Occupy Wall Street protestor. The case centers around Malcolm Harris, an OWS disciple who prosecutors charged with disorderly conduct while [...]

Earlier this month media reports of increased government surveillance of electronic communications have rattled the public on both sides of the Atlantic.  Here in the United States, the ACLU revealed on April 2 that it had surveyed about 200 law enforcement agencies across the country and found that many of them track cell phones without [...]