Policy Observatory

Privacy activist Max Schrems filed suit in front of a court in his home country, Austria, and he asked the public to join him: it was possible for any Facebook user of age who is not located in the USA or Canada to join the legal battle against Facebook’s numerous alleged violations of European privacy laws. This is due to the fact that every Facebook user worldwide, living outside of the US or Canada, has a contract with Facebook Ireland Ltd. Mr. Schrems is claiming 500 Euro in symbolic damages per contributing joint plaintiff for alleged privacy violations such as Facebook contributing to NSA´s PRISM program, Graph Search, the Facebook app or third party tracking via “Like Buttons”.

The Federal Communications Commission has settled an enforcement action against AT&T for the company's massive consumer privacy violations. According to the Commission, employees at AT&T call centers around the world accessed the "CPNI" (call record information) of nearly 280,000 U.S. customers without their permission. Then AT&T distributed that information to traffickers of stolen cell phones. As a condition of settlement, AT&T will pay a $25 million penalty, eclipsing the 2014 Verizon settlement as the FCC's largest ever data security action. EPIC has long supported the robust defense of CPNI privacy.

US Federal Trade Commission bureau director says EU national data protection authorities had only referred four privacy complaints over the 15 years life span of Safe Harbour.

Jessica Rich, bureau director at the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) said European national data authorities were supposed to alert the FTC of any possible violations under the scheme but they seldom did.

After an investigation by the Dutch Data Protection authority, Nike agreed to take measures to remedy any Dutch privacy violations found in the way it’s Nike+ app was designed. These include: notifying existing users of the app (and Nike+ users on the web) that height and weight are optional, and asking them for consent to retain existing data; introducing a single privacy policy with greater disclosures and a data retention period for inactive users. The Nike+ investigation provides valuable guidance for the mobile health industry regarding privacy issues.