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Earlier this year, a number of individuals brought a lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington against Washington-based company Wyze Labs, Inc (Wyze), which manufactures “smart” home cameras and security equipment. See In re: Wyze Data Incident Litigation, Case No. C20-0282-JCC (W.D. Wa. 2020). The lawsuit – which centered around a 2019 data breach incident – alleged that Wyze failed to comply with Federal Trade Commission requirements for safeguarding users’ personal information. …
Continue Reading Arbitration Agreements in Privacy Disputes: The Wyze Decision and the CCPA

As privacy-related litigation continues to heat up, Judge Beth Freeman (ND Cal.) recently laid out in In re Google Assistant Privacy Litigation (Case No. 19-cv-04286)[1] a potential roadmap for surviving or winning a motion to dismiss on privacy-related causes of action.

The consolidated lawsuit against Google alleges violations on twelve counts, all relating to the Google Assistant product – a voice-activated technology used in mobile and home devices that listens for “hotwords” in order to carry out user commands. This case is an important one to watch and should be broadly instructive as many companies, big and small, are and have been hard at work on voice-activated technologies (compare, for instance, to Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, and countless speech recognition start-ups around the world). Huge numbers of households and individuals currently have these devices in their homes and/or on their person at all times.
Continue Reading A Roadmap to Litigating Privacy Claims? A Look at a Recent Order From the Google Assistant Privacy Litigation

With the explosion of COVID-19 cases worldwide, companies and governments have expanded their interest in the use of the vast stores of consumer data. Even where such collection and use of personal data is ostensibly for the public good, the privacy rights and legal requirements applicable to such data must be considered carefully.[i]…
Continue Reading Public Ends From Private Means: Privacy Rights and Benevolent Use of Personal Data