News Items Topics Internet Law Update

California Updates Privacy Regulation and Appoints Privacy Protection Agency Board Members

The California Attorney General announced a set of amendments to the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) regulations, effective March 15, 2021. The new regulations provide instructions for businesses that collect personal information in the course of interacting with consumers offline. These businesses must inform consumers “by an offline method of their right to opt-out and provide instructions on how to ...

Israeli Gov’t Revises Draft Bill Granting Powers to the National Cyber Directorate

The Israeli government introduced a revised version of a draft bill for Cyber Defense and the National Cyber Directorate. The move comes just a few weeks after the government introduced the bill’s previous version which would have authorized the National Cyber Directorate (NCD) to instruct an organization how it should prepare for cyberattacks, provided the NCD is convinced that the ...

European Data Protection Board Issues Draft Guidance on Virtual Voice Assistants

The panel of data protection authorities of the member states of the European Union (European Data Protection Board – EDPB), published for public comments its guidelines on Virtual Voice Assistants (VVAs). The draft guidelines emphasize that Virtual Voice Assistants, by their very nature, process voluminous personal data, which in turn warrants special attention to their data protection implications. Also, given ...

Virginia Enacts Consumer Data Protection Act

The Governor of Virginia signed the state’s Consumer Data Protection Act (VCDPA) into law, marking it the second state in the U.S. to codify a major privacy and data protection law, after California. The VCDPA follows some of the arrangements of the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) as amended by the Consumer Privacy Rights Act (CPRA), but still departs from ...

Israeli High Court Orders Gov’t to Minimize Cellular Network-Based Tracking of COVID-19 Cases

The Supreme Court of Israel struck down major components in the Israeli government’s nearly one-year-long use of the Israeli Security Agency (colloquially called “Shabak”) in cellular-network-based monitoring of the whereabouts of individuals for epidemiological investigations to prevent the spread of COVID-19. The Supreme Court ordered the government to cease its current widespread use of cellular-network-based monitoring by March 14, 2021. ...

Israeli Legislature Enacts Law on Technology-Monitored COVID-19 Home Isolation

The Knesset (the Israeli legislature) enacted an amendment to the Coronavirus measures law to allow for technology-monitored home isolation of Israelis returning from abroad. The law recognizes that those returning from abroad carry a higher risk of contracting COVID-19, particularly global variants of the virus, and thus should be given a choice of technology-monitored home isolation or a physically guarded ...

Israeli High Court Enjoins Disclosure of Personal Data of Unvaccinated Individuals to Local Authorities

The Supreme Court of Israel issued a preliminary injunction against the Israeli Ministry of Health (“MoH”), ordering it not to disclose personal data of individuals not vaccinated for COVID-19 to local authorities and the Ministries of Education and Labor. The injunction was issued against a legislative amendment passed by the Knesset (the Israeli legislature) ten days earlier. The amendment authorizes ...

The GDPR’s Implications on Processing Personal Data for Health Research

In early February 2021, the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) issued a paper clarifying some of the GDPR’s implications on processing personal data for health-related research, in response to the European Commission’s questions on this topic.

The EDPB’s document is a preliminary one. It offers a partial, rather than a comprehensive, overview of the topic. The EDPB indicates that ...

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