Happy new year and welcome to the first newsletter of 2023! –and the last for 2022 but I feel like we all want to move past this year, no?
This week proved to be slow, for obvious reasons, so we have some the-week-beforeers show up. Let’s see how IT Law ended the year, shall we?
🔏 Data Protection & Privacy
Attorney General’s office of the District of Columbia reached an agreement with Google resulting in the company now being obligated to make clear to consumers how their location data is collected, stored, and used. The agreement follows the District’s allegations that Google deceived and manipulated consumers, including through use of dark patterns, to trick users and gain access to their location data. Google has also undertaken to pay $9.5 million to the District. Google’s misleading data policies regarding location tracking had ended in a $391.5 million settlement with 40 other states, earlier in the year.
The Spanish Data Protection Agency (“AEPD”) decided that the use of Google Analytics by a public body did not involve breach of data protection rules. How? I asked the same thing. The AEPD’s decision is based primarily on the premises that the public body did not process data with the purpose of identifying website users, and that they stopped using Google Analytic after learning of the Schrems II decision.
🎩 Competition
The FTC ordered Mastercard to stop forcing merchants to route debit card payments through its network, and blocking the use of competing debit payment networks. The proposed FTC order includes that Mastercard will have to provide competing networks with customer information for processing of payments, a practice previously not adopted by Mastercard. Some things just make sense.
🛒 E-Commerce & Digital Consumer
Türkiye published its bylaw on e-commerce intermediary service providers and e-commerce service providers. The bylaw follows amendments to national e-commerce legislation to take force in 2023- yay, today! The amendment excludes various service providers whose areas of activity are listed, from the scope of the e-commerce legislation. These include, among others, areas like civil aviation, banking, insurance, capital markets and electronic communications. The amendment also set up a new regime of e-commerce service providers and intermediaries, with distinctions made according to monetary limits in and quantity of, e-commerce transactions. Big year for e-commerce is loading for jurisdictions around the globe.
Across the ocean, Apple is being sued over allegations that its smart watch is racially biased. The allegation follows research that pulse oximeter technology is less effective when used on darker skin tones. Apple had previously published a white paper on the technology used, elaborating on the wide range of skin tones the app was tested on and the adjusting technology. We’ll be interested to keep an eye on this one.
📄 Recommended Readings
Last but not least, here is a concise list –in no particular order– of recent publications that caught my eye this week that you may also find interesting, having come all the way to the bottom of the page, for which I thank and congratulate you.
- What does the Digital Markets Act harmonize? – exploring interactions between the DMA and national competition laws by Jasper van den Boom in the European Competition Journal.
- Thinking of data as an economic good: what it can (not) teach us about data governance by Nadezhda Purtova & Gijs van Maanen.
- Juridical Discourse for Platforms by Thomas E. Kadri in Harvard Law Review.
- GPT Takes the Bar Exam by Michael James Bommarito & Daniel Martin Katz.
- From Mutual Trust to the Gordian Knot of Notifications The EU E-Evidence Legislative Project by Theodore Christakis in The Cambridge Handbook of Digital Evidence in Criminal Matters, Cambridge University Press (Vanessa Franssen, Stanislaw Tosza, eds).
I am in no way affiliated with the authors or publishers in sharing these, and I try to include mostly open access publications due to, well you know, accessibility of knowledge and science.
