News Items Topics Internet Law Update

FTC Continues Enforcement of Unfair and Deceptive Online Activities

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has issued two administrative complaints and proposed settlements enforcing the U.S. federal Consumer Review Fairness Act (CRFA), against two companies that had included “non-disparagement” clauses in their consumer contracts, restricting consumers from posting negative reviews online. The CRFA prohibits non-disparagement provisions in consumer form contracts, which are standardized terms used in selling or leasing ...

San Francisco Bans Use of Facial-Recognition Technology

The city of San Francisco has decided to prohibit the use of facial recognition technology by police and other local government authorities. The ban is part of an anti-surveillance ordinance that the city's Board of Supervisors approved, making it the largest American city to ban facial recognition technology.

The ordinance will come into force next month. It prohibits the use ...

New EU Regulation Governing the Use of Drones

The European Union has published common rules on the use of drones, aimed at harmonizing the law on this issue across the 28 member states of the EU, so that drone operators better understand what they may and may not do. According to the European Union’s Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), “once drone operators have received authorization in [their] state of ...

A Medical Imaging Company Will Pay 3 Million Dollars in HIPAA Data Breach Settlement

A diagnostic medical imaging company from Tennessee has settled an investigated by the FBI and the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) at the U.S Department of Health and Human Services, which enforces the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA). The company was investigated for a breach in its servers that enabled unauthorized access to sensitive health information, ...

Australia: Employers Cannot Force Employees to Provide Fingerprint Samples For a Biometric Time Clock

In a landmark decision, Australia’s national workplace relations tribunal - the Fair Work Commission – has ruled that employers may not force workers to use biometric time clocks in the workplace, and that any dismissal based on a worker’s refusal to submit their fingerprints is unlawful.

The Fair Work Commission's holding overruled an earlier decision, according to which an employer’s ...

Year Two of the GDPR Commences with Regulatory Attention on the AdTech Industry and Additional Fines Imposed

Italy’s privacy regulator imposes a million Euro fine on Facebook. Facebook’s pre-GDPR data protection breaches in the context of the Cambridge Analytica fiasco has now attracted a million Euro fine imposed by the Italian privacy regulator. The Italian regulator found that Facebook had disclosed to the third-party “This Is Your Digital Life” app, personal data of 214,077 Italian users. ...

Israeli Court Rules Bitcoin is Not a Form of Currency Exempted From Tax FROM TAX

The Israeli District Court in Lod delivered a landmark decision classifying Bitcoin as an asset subject to capital gains tax. The decision was handed down in a dispute between the Israeli tax authority and the founder of a Blockchain-technology transportation startup.


The founder gained over 8 Million Israeli Shekels (nearly $2,500,000) in profits, by selling Bitcoin he had previously purchased. ...

GDPR Updates: Draft Guidelines on Contract as a Legal Basis, Clinical Trial Data Processing, Online Services Used by Children and Biometric Data at the Workplace

Performance of an Online Services Contract as a Legal Basis for Data Processing. The European Data Protection Board (EDPB) has published draft guidelines on processing personal data in the context of online services, under the legal basis of performance of an online service contract. Processing under the GDPR is permissible only if it is performed under a recognized legal basis. ...

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