Privacy & Information Security Law Blog

On December 22, 2014, the Federal Trade Commission announced that it notified China-based BabyBus (Fujian) Network Technology Co., Ltd., (“BabyBus”) that several of the company’s mobile applications (“apps”) appear to be in violation of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule (the “COPPA Rule”). In a letter dated December 17, 2014, the FTC warned BabyBus of potential COPPA violations stemming from allegations that the company has failed to obtain verifiable parental consent prior to its apps collecting and disclosing the precise geolocation information of users under the age of 13.

On December 18, 2014, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (“FinCEN”) issued a $1 million civil penalty against Thomas E. Haider, the former Chief Compliance Officer of MoneyGram International, Inc. (“MoneyGram”). In a press release announcing the assessment, FinCEN alleged that during Haider’s oversight of compliance for MoneyGram, he failed to adequately respond to thousands of customer complaints regarding schemes that utilized MoneyGram to defraud consumers. In coordination with FinCEN, the U.S. Attorney’s office in the Southern District of New York filed a civil complaint on the same day, seeking a $1 million civil judgment against Haider to collect on the assessment and requesting injunctive relief barring him from participating in the affairs of any financial institution located or conducting business in the United States.

On December 19, 2014, the Federal Trade Commission announced a settlement of at least $90 million with mobile phone carrier T-Mobile USA, Inc. (“T-Mobile”) stemming from allegations related to mobile cramming. This settlement amount will primarily be used to provide refunds to affected customers who were charged by T-Mobile for unauthorized third party charges. As part of the settlement, T-Mobile also will pay $18 million in fines and penalties to the attorneys general of all 50 states and the District of Columbia, and $4.5 million to the Federal Communications Commission.

On December 15, 2014, Microsoft reported the filing of 10 amicus briefs in the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals signed by 28 leading technology and media companies, 35 leading computer scientists, and 23 trade associations and advocacy organizations, in support of Microsoft’s litigation to resist a U.S. Government’s search warrant purporting to compel the production of Microsoft customer emails that are stored in Ireland. In opposing the Government’s assertion of extraterritorial jurisdiction in this case, Microsoft and its supporters have argued that their stance seeks to promote privacy and trust in cross-border commerce and advance a “broad policy issue” that is “fundamental to the future of global technology.”

On December 14, 2014, the University of Amsterdam and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology issued a press release about two recent meetings of the EU-U.S. Privacy Bridges Project in Washington, D.C. (held September 22-23, 2014) and Brussels (held December 9-10, 2014). The Privacy Bridges Project is a group of approximately 20 privacy experts from the EU and U.S. convened by Jacob Kohnstamm, Chairman of the Dutch Data Protection Authority and former Chairman of the Article 29 Working Party, to develop practical solutions for bridging the gap between EU and U.S. privacy regimes and legal systems. Bojana Bellamy, President of the Centre for Information Policy Leadership at Hunton & Williams (the “Centre”), and Fred Cate, the Centre’s Senior Policy Advisor are members of this group.

As reported in the Hunton Employment & Labor Perspectives Blog:

In Purple Communications, Inc., a divided National Labor Relations Board (“NLRB”) held that employees have the right to use their employers’ email systems for statutorily protected communications, including self-organization and other terms and conditions of employment, during non-working time. In making this determination, the NLRB reversed its divided 2007 decision in Register Guard, which held that employees have no statutory right to use their employer’s email systems for Section 7 purposes.

Former UK Information Commissioner and Centre for Information Policy Leadership (the “Centre”) Global Strategy Advisor Richard Thomas was invited to make a presentation at a roundtable on Privacy Risk Management and Next Steps at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (“OECD’s”) 37th meeting of the Working Party on Security and Privacy in the Digital Economy (“Working Party”). The meeting was attended by governmental and regulatory officials from most OECD member countries, with various other participants and observers.

In an article entitled The Rise of Accountability from Policy to Practice and Into the Cloud published by the International Association of Privacy Professinals, Bojana Bellamy, President of the Centre for Information Policy Leadership at Hunton & Williams (the “Centre”), outlines the rapid global uptake of “accountability” as a cornerstone of effective data protection and points to the recent ISO 27018 data privacy cloud standard as one of the latest examples.

On December 11, 2014, in response to a request for a preliminary ruling from the Supreme Administrative Court of the Czech Republic, the Court of Justice of the European Union (“CJEU”) ruled that the use of CCTV in the EU should be strictly limited, and that the exemption for “personal or household activity” does not permit the use of a home CCTV camera that also films any public space.

The Department of Health and Human Services (“HHS”) recently announced a resolution agreement and $150,000 settlement with Anchorage Community Mental Health Services, Inc. (“ACHMS”) in connection with a data breach caused by malware. ACHMS, which provides nonprofit behavioral health care services in Alaska, experienced a breach in March 2012 that affected the electronic protected health information (“ePHI”) of 2,743 individuals. After ACHMS reported the breach to the HHS Office for Civil Rights (“OCR”), OCR investigated ACHMS and found several HIPAA Security Rule violations, including that ACHMS had failed to: