Ken Klippenstein and Eric Lichtblau report: Within hours of the storming of the Capitol on January 6, the FBI began securing thousands of phone and electronic records connected to people at the scene of the rioting — including some related to members of Congress, raising potentially thorny legal questions. Using special emergency powers and other…
Category: U.S.
Ninth Circuit Sends Alexa Surreptitious Recording Case to Arbitration–Tice v. Amazon
Venkat Balasubramani writes about the appellate opinion in Tice v. Amazon, No. 20-55432 (9th Cir. Feb. 19, 2021): Lawsuits over voice-activated assistants (and other smart home devices) are interesting. Plaintiffs have been creative about who asserts the claims to navigate around the issue that often sinks class actions: arbitration. This has resulted in claims brought by…
Entire California School Board Resigns After Chewing Out Parents on Accidental Zoom Broadcast
Alyse Stanley reports: It’s hard to believe that almost a year into the pandemic pushing everything virtual, there are people still struggling to get the hang of Zoom. And yet here we are. All members of a northern California school board have resigned after being caught deriding parents in a profanity-laden Zoom meeting they didn’t realize was being…
Maryland Joins New York with a BIPA-like Biometric Privacy Bill
Joseph Lazzarotti writes: On January 13, House Delegate Sara Love Introduced the “Biometric Identifiers and Biometric Information Privacy Act” (the “Act”) substantially modeled after the Biometric Information Privacy Act in Illinois, 740 ILCS 14 et seq. (the “BIPA”). Enacted in 2008, the Illinois BIPA only recently triggered an avalanche of class actions in Illinois, spurring other legislative…