Yesterday, after more than a year of deliberation, Indonesia passed a sweeping data privacy law. Following a string of data breaches and leaks at government organizations, lawmakers greatly welcomed the bill. Violating this new law can result in corporate fines (up to 2% of annual revenue) and even prison time.
The Berkeley Consumer Laws Scholars Conference (March 2-3, 2023), from Berkeley’s Center for Consumer Law & Economic Justice, has extended their call for abstracts to this Friday, September 23. To submit an abstract, please fill out this form.
California governor Gavin Newsom has just signed a huge bill (called the California Age-Appropriate Design Code Act) protecting children’s online safety. The bill, strongly opposed by the tech industry, includes sweeping safeguards for users under 18 across a variety of online services: social media, games, connected toys, voice assistants, digital learning tools, and more. The law will take effect in 2024.
The Federal Court in Canada has ruled in favor of two Somali women who were stripped of their refugee status after officials at the Canadian Border Services Agency used facial recognition technology to allege that they were actually Kenyan. The Agency used Clearview AI, a facial recognition surveillance technology company (which also has federal contracts with the U.S. government).
The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) ruled yesterday that antitrust authorities, as part of their antitrust investigations, are allowed to assess whether companies are compliant with EU data protection rules (GDPR), dealing a blow to Meta. This case came to the CJEU from Germany, where Meta challenged a finding that it had taken advantage of its market power when it collected data without permission, which brought forth the question of whether antitrust investigations can cover data privacy issues. The CJEU answered yes, stating that potential violations of privacy laws are relevant to violations of antitrust laws.
The CJEU also ruled that Germany’s data retention law is unlawful. In the opinion, the CJEU made clear that the blanket data collection law was to be applied very narrowly—only in situations involving serious national security threats—and was otherwise illegal. Member states had been banking on the vast data collection for the purposes of protecting national security and fighting crime.
Spawning AI has just launched a tool, Have I Been Trained?, which allows you to see if your image has been used to train popular AI art models. The tool will search across a set of 5.8 billion images. Ontario is investing nearly $1.8 million in new video surveillance systems. This funding will go towards updated CCTV cameras, software, and installation.
(Compiled by Student Fellow Eunice Park)