PRIVACY + SECURITY BLOG

News, Developments, and Insights

Being a Juror Can Result in a Huge Loss of Privacy

by Daniel J. Solove For trial attorneys, a key component to winning is carefully selecting people for the jury and tailoring arguments to best influence, nudge, or perhaps even manipulate jurors into reaching a particular verdict. As a result, there is a hunger to learn about the private lives of jurors, and serving on a […]

How the FTC Can Readily Halt Identity Theft

by Daniel J. Solove Identity theft is terrible crime, and it can wreak havoc on victims’ lives. In an identity theft, the thief uses a victim’s personal information to improperly access accounts, obtain credit in the victim’s name, or impersonate the victim for other purposes. But there is an effective way to stop a lot […]

Is the Right to Be Forgotten Good or Bad? This Is the Wrong Question

by Daniel J. Solove Is the right to be forgotten good or bad? This is the question many are asking these days in light of the recent EU Court of Justice (ECJ) decision that requires search engines such as Google to remove personal data from search results when people request it. (For more background, I […]

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 […]