PRIVACY + SECURITY BLOG

News, Developments, and Insights

What Google Must Forget: The EU Ruling on the Right to Be Forgotten

  by Daniel J. Solove In a momentous decision, the EU Court of Justice has ruled in favor of a Spanish man who sought to have links to his personal data removed from Google search results. Under what has become known as the “right to be forgotten,” EU citizens have a right to the deletion […]

6 Lessons from the Costliest HIPAA Settlement to Date

by Daniel J. Solove The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office for Civil Rights (OCR) recently announced the costliest HIPAA settlement to date — a $4.8 million settlement with New York and Presbyterian Hospital (NYP) and Columbia University (CU). The case involved the disclosure of protected health information on the Internet. Here […]

Snapchat and FTC Privacy and Security Consent Orders

by Daniel J. Solove Co-authored by Woodrow Hartzog The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) recently entered into a consent order with the media service Snapchat for not living up to its promises about how it maintains the privacy and security of user’s data. The FTC order prohibits Snapchat from “misrepresenting the extent to which it maintains […]

Big Data and Our Children’s Future: On Reforming FERPA

by Daniel J. Solove Last week, the White House released its report, Big Data: Seizing Opportunities, Preserving Values. My reaction to it is mixed. The report mentions some concerns about privacy with Big Data and suggests some reforms, but everything is stated so mildly, in a way designed to please everyone. The report is painted […]

Why Did inBloom Die? A Hard Lesson About Education Privacy

by Daniel J. Solove For any organization who doesn’t take privacy seriously, the demise of inBoom should be a loud wake up call. Funded by $100 million from the Gates Foundation, inBloom was a non-profit organization aiming to store student data so that school officials and teachers could use it to learn about their students […]

Our Privacy and Data Security Depend Upon Contracts Between Organizations

by Daniel J. Solove Increasingly, companies, hospitals, schools, and other organizations are using cloud service providers (and also other third party data service providers) to store and process the personal data of their customers, patients, clients, and others. When an entity shares people’s personal data with a cloud service provider, this data is protected in […]

The Future of Global Privacy: Conflict or Harmony?

by Daniel J. Solove I recently had the opportunity to interview Christopher Kuner, Senior Of Counsel with Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati in Brussels. He is also an Honorary Professor at the University of Copenhagen, a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics, and teaches at the University of Cambridge. He is editor-in-chief of […]

5 Key Quotes from the FTC v. Wyndham Decision on Data Security

by Daniel J. Solove This post was co-authored by Professor Woodrow Hartzog. The long-awaited federal district court opinion in FTC v. Wyndham was finally released last week. The U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey rejected Wyndham’s arguments that the FTC lacks the authority to regulate unfair data security practices, that the FTC […]

Heartbleed: A Data Security Bug of Titanic Proportions that Affects Most of the Internet and that Will Have Enormous Implications

by Daniel J. Solove It sounds like a late April Fool’s joke, but it isn’t. Heartbleed, a data security bug in Open SSL, allows hackers to access personal data and encryption keys. This vulnerability has existed for 2+ years, and there is no way to know if your data has been compromised. And the majority […]

One of the Most Important Data Security Cases Was Just Decided: FTC v. Wyndham

by Daniel J. Solove The case has been quite long in the making. The opinion has been eagerly anticipated in privacy and data security circles. Fifteen years of regulatory actions have been hanging in the balance. We have waited and waited for the decision, and yesterday, it finally arrived. The case is FTC v. Wyndham, […]