The Privacy Advisor Podcast: On why CaCPA is bad law and suing Kanye West

08/10/18 • 36 min

What we know about attorney Jay Edelson to date: He loves beach volleyball so much that he had a court installed at his Chicago law firm so he and his crew could blow off steam. The New York Times refers to him as Silicon Valley's "baby faced boogeyman" for his aggressive court takedowns of tech behemoths. And he's got a very firm grasp on the global privacy and data protection legislative landscape. In this episode of The Privacy Advisor Podcast, Edelson talks about his latest legal pursuits, including a class-action lawsuit against Facebook for alleged violation of biometric privacy law, and another against Kanye West over alleged consumer privacy violations via his music streaming service, Tidal. Edelson also discusses why he thinks the new California Consumer Protection Act is no good.

Previous Episode

The Privacy Advisor Podcast: Why is Carpenter such a big deal?

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June that the government generally must have a warrant to gather location data from cellphones. The case followed an appeal filed by Timothy Carpenter after he was convicted for a series of armed robberies with help from cellphone data obtained by law enforcement without a warrant. Lawyers representing Carpenter asserted that his Fourth Amendment rights were violated, as the lack of a warrant constitutes as an unreasonable search and seizure. The case incited much reaction from both privacy and law enforcement advocates. But now that the dust has settled a bit, what can we take away from the case and how might this change the trajectory of digital surveillance policy in the U.S.? Prof. Orin Kerr of the University of Southern California School of Law and Jennifer Granick of the American Civil Liberties Union, discuss why the case is so significant and what it could mean for the future of digital surveillance, the third-party doctrine and how the Fourth Amendment applies. Kerr also weighs in on how this the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court might impact Fourth Amendment cases in the future.

Next Episode

The Privacy Advisor Podcast: Product design as power and manipulation

Woodrow Hartzog is law professor at Northeastern University in Boston, and his research focuses on quote “the complex problems that arise when personal information is collected by powerful new technologies, stored and disclosed online.” In this episode of The Privacy Advisor Podcast, Hartzog discusses discusses the ways that technologies are designed, at the engineering level, to undermine our privacy. Social media companies, for example, which make money on user data via advertisers, "have every incentive to use the power they have with designers to engineer your almost near-constant disclosure of information," Hartzog says, adding our modern privacy frameworks, which emphasize informed consent, are broken models. "We will be worn down by design, our consent is pre-ordained," he says.