By: Cameron Abbott, Stephanie Mayhew, and Rob Pulham
The long-awaited privacy reform has finally been introduced into the Australian Parliament today with the introduction of the Privacy and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2024. Described as ‘Tranche 1’ of the reforms, the Bill introduces significant uplifts to several aspects of Australia’s privacy laws.
Read MoreBy Cameron Abbott, Rob Pulham, and Stephanie Mayhew
In 2023 the Attorney-General’s Department released the “Privacy Act Review Report” (Review Report), which considered whether the Australian Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and its enforcement mechanisms are fit for purpose in an environment where Australians now live much of their lives online and their information is collected and used for a myriad of purposes in the digital economy.
Read MoreBy: Cameron Abbott, Rob Pulham, Dadar Ahmadi-Pirshahid, and Adam Asadurian
Astonishingly (…or perhaps not, for anyone who’s answered a phone call recently), “imposter calls” are the number one offender of spam calls in the United States, amounting to 33% of all phone calls according to a recent study by QR Code Generator.
Read MoreBy: Cameron Abbott, Andrew Gaffney, Harry Kingsley, Rob Pulham, and Stephanie Mayhew
Australia’s corporate regulator, ASIC, has released new guidance on how to comply with market disclosure requirements when a listed company is in the middle of investigating and responding to a cyber incident.
Read MoreBy Jason W. Callen and Christopher J. Valente
On 21 March 2024, Tennessee became the first state in the United States to prohibit unauthorized use of artificial intelligence (AI) to replicate an individual’s likeness, image, and voice when its governor signed the Ensuring Likeness, Voice and Image Security Act of 2024 (ELVIS Act). The protections in the ELVIS Act for a person’s voice from AI misuse is particularly notable. Tennessee, like other states, already had prohibitions on unauthorized use of an individual’s likeness and image. And while some other states, such as California, have also protected a person’s voice, none had expressly linked all three—likeness, image, and voice—to AI.
Read MoreBy Andrew Glass, Gregory Blase, and Joshua Durham
Effective immediately, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) banned AI-generated phone calls with its recent Declaratory Ruling (the Ruling). Known as audio or voice “deepfakes,” AI can be trained to mimic any person’s voice, resulting in novel scams such as grandparents receiving a call from their “grandchild” and believing they have been kidnapped or need money for bail. FCC Commissioner Starks deemed such deepfakes a threat to election integrity, recalling that just recently, “potential primary voters in New Hampshire received a call, purportedly from President Biden, telling them to stay home and ‘save your vote’ by skipping the state’s primary.”
Read MoreBy Whitney E. McCollum and Eric F. Vicente Flores
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued a first-of-its-kind proposed order prohibiting Rite Aid Corporation from using facial recognition technology for surveillance purposes for five years.
The FTC alleged that Rite Aid’s facial recognition technology generated thousands of false-positive matches that incorrectly indicated a consumer matched the identity of an individual who was suspected or accused of wrongdoing. The FTC alleged that false-positive matches were more likely to occur in Rite Aid stores located in “plurality-Black” “plurality-Asian” and “plurality-Latino” areas. Additionally, Rite Aid allegedly failed to take reasonable measures to prevent harm to consumers when deploying its facial recognition technology. Reasonable measures include: inquiring about the accuracy of its technology before using it; preventing the use of low-quality images; training or overseeing employees tasked with operating the facial recognition technology; and implementing procedures for tracking the rate of false positive matches.
Read MoreIn its judgment dated 7 December 2023 (C-634/21 – Schufa) presented by the Administrative Court Wiesbaden (Germany), the court held that Article 22 of the GDPR (Art. 22 GDPR) applies also to probability values that are created by credit scoring agencies on the basis of personal data and used by third parties in order to decide whether the respective individual is eligible for a credit or establishing a contract.
Read MoreIn a judgment dated 5 December 2023 (Case C-807/21 – Deutsche Wohnen) presented by the Higher Regional Court Berlin (Kammergericht), the Court of Justice for the European Union (CJEU) held that a German law permitting administrative fines against corporate entities where an identified legal representative of that entity was proven to have committed a criminal or administrative offence, which at the same time led to the corporate entity breaching its obligations, is not in line with GDPR.
Read MoreBy Eric Vicente Flores and Michael Stortz
Executive Summary: The California Privacy Protection Agency has proposed a new set of draft regulations that aim to regulate the use of artificial intelligence and automated decision making technology. These regulations will be discussed alongside other draft regulations the agency has previously proposed regarding risk assessments and cybersecurity assessments. The three sets of draft regulations will be discussed at the agency’s meeting on 8 December.
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