Uncategorized

The Privacy Law Scholars Conference is inviting submission of abstracts for its 15th annual conference (PLSC 2022), which will be held in person on Thursday and Friday, June 2 and 3, 2022 at Northeastern University in Boston, MA. Abstracts are due by 5 PM ET on January 31, 2022.…

The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University filed an amicus brief in a case challenging a Florida law limiting the power of social media companies to moderate speech on their platforms. The Knight Institute urges the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals to affirm the district court’s decision to block the law on the grounds of its constitutionality, including the law’s specific targeting of platforms perceived to have a liberal bias (e.g.…

A bipartisan group of House lawmakers has introduced the filter bubble Transparency Act which requires companies like Meta (then known as ‘Facebook’) and YouTube to offer a version of their platforms that runs on an “input-transparent” algorithm that doesn’t pull on user data to generate recommendations.…

Upcoming Events Guarini Colloquium: Regulating Global Digital Corporations – Monday November 8, 2021, 17:20 – 18:20. In this NYU Law School colloquium, Hong Shen, the author of Alibaba: Infrastructuring Global China Routledge 2021) will be joining to discuss Alibaba’s role in China’s digital economy and beyond.…

Donald Trump’s new social network, Truth Social, has been reported to be a thinly disguised variant of the Mastodon social network codebase.  Mastodon is free software that anyone can use as long as they comply with Mastodon’s license terms, which Truth Social may be in violation of.…

The Guarini Center will host a colloquium on the global data economy.  They will seek legal solutions to deal with data as a new type of asset in order to foster innovation and growth and to reduce obstacles for all stakeholders in the data economy.…

The Brazilian National Data Protection Authority (ANPD) and the Spanish Data Protection Agency (AEPD) – the administrative authorities responsible for data protection in Brazil and Spain, respectively – signed a Memorandum of Intellectual Cooperation for the protection of personal data, both at a national and transnational level.…

Russia is seeking a fine from Facebook totaling 5-10% of its annual turnover in the country. In 2020 Russia passed legislation that allows regulators to fine internet providers if they repeatedly fail to delete content when requested. While Russia said Facebook had complied with demands to delete some of the requested content, it announced it would seek the fine because Facebook had not taken down all of the content it had requested.…

The “Facebook Files,” a series of articles about internal Facebook research reports that were revealed recently to the Wall Street Journal, has provided a window into Facebook’s understanding of many of the flaws on its platform. Notable revelations include that Facebook is aware of Instagram use being harmful to a “sizable percentage” of teenage girls (a finding which led Facebook to delay the introduction of Instagram for Kids), that tweaks to the News Feed algorithm made in 2018 resulted in more engagement but also led to more hate speech and increased anger, and that Mark Zuckerberg’s personally directed efforts to curb vaccination misinformation on the platform were largely a failure.…

Upcoming Events Guarini Colloquium: Regulating Global Digital Corporations – Monday September 27, 2021, 17:20 – 18:20 In this NYU Law School colloquium, participants will read and discuss a recent paper by Elettra Bietti on digital platform regulation. (link) News Items  China passed the Personal Information Privacy Law (PIPL) at the end of August 2021.…