Case Law & Court Rules

On November 9, 2015, the D.C. District Court filed an order barring the US government from collecting, as part of the NSA’s Bulk Telephony Metadata Program, any metadata associated with a California lawyer and his law firm. Klayman v. Obama.  However, on November 10, 2015, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ordered […]

In December 2015, a class action lawsuit was filed in Superior Court in Los Angeles against Mattel and ToyTalk by parents looking for injunctive relief and money damages for Defendants’ inherently dangerous product (Hello Barbie) and unlawful and negligent collection, use, and distribution of minors’ personal information. “Hello Barbie” is an artificial intelligence-enabled fashion doll […]

On October 19, 2015, Apple reiterated that it is technically impossible for them to respond to government’s request for customers data. The US Eastern District Court of New York asked Apple whether the assistance the government seeks from Apple to investigate consumers’ electronic devices is technically feasible and, if so, whether compliance with the proposed order would […]

On October 10, 2015, the Vienna Court of Appeal (Oberlandesgericht Wien) issued a written decision in the Austrian Data Protection action against Facebook. The Court of Appeal overturned the Vienna Regional Court’s decision of July 2015 that had rejected plaintiff Maximilian Schrems’ complaint for lack of jurisdiction. See here. On July 14, 2015, the plaintiff had appealed […]

On October 20, 2015, the Irish Data Protection Commission declared that it will proceed to investigate the substance of the complaint brought by Schrems against Facebook “with all due diligence” after the European Court of Justice held the Safe Harbor Decision invalid. The investigation will commence under section 10 of the Irish Data Protection Act and it […]

The Weltimmo decision issued by the European Court of Justice on October 1, 2015 is probably one of the most important decisions on processing of data. It is so for three reasons. First, it defines the “establishment” in the most peculiar way, which has consequences in point of application of national data protection of the member states and […]

On September 21, 2015, the French Data protection Authority CNIL (Commission Nationale de l’Information et des Libertés) rejected Google’s informal appeal against the formal notice (see here) requesting it to apply delisting on all the search engine’s domain names, not only “fr” but also  .es; .co.uk; .com, etc. The CNIL noted that if the right to be forgotten is […]

The US Court of Appeals for the Third District confirmed that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), does have authority to bring an unfairness claim involving data security breach without formally issuing regulations before bringing such claims. Background. As reported here, after several data breaches the FTC alleged that Wyndham “failed to provide reasonable and appropriate […]

  Italian municipalities cannot publish on their website the names of those who did not pay city taxes. After one municipality announced the intention of publishing the names of those who did not comply with their fiscal duties, the Garante della Privacy (the Italian Data Protection Authority) started an investigation and clarified that the publication […]

As reported here, on May 7, 2015, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit found that the controversial surveillance program according to which the NSA collected Americans’ phone records was not authorized under Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act (ACLU v. Clapper, 2015 U.S. App. LEXIS 7531). On June 9 – after […]