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Brett advises clients in a variety of industries and focuses his practice principally upon mergers and acquisitions, commercial contracts, data security and privacy law, information technology and software licensing, corporate governance, start-up entity formation and emerging growth financing.

Thank you, reader, for taking time out of your day to read this blog post. I trust before clicking on this link you first sought out our website’s Privacy Policy and reviewed it in full, took mental notes while silently nodding throughout, and finished with an audible “I agree” before moving on to review this content. Correct?

Very likely you did not, but take solace in knowing you are in good company. Only 22% of Americans report “often” or “always” reading online privacy policies, and that’s solely for websites which require browsers to affirmatively agree to a privacy policy (i.e., flashing a pop-up with some form of “check the box” affirmation). This does not engender much confidence that Americans are actively seeking out and consenting to the privacy policies embedded within the myriad of websites they visit on a daily basis. And who can blame them – a 2008 study estimated it would take 244 hours each year to read every privacy policy in full for all the websites an average web browser visited annually. So put down your summer beach novel and start reading privacy policies – you’re already 10 weeks behind.

All kidding aside, this is a real problem for the United States’ federal data privacy legal framework, which is guided in part upon the Federal Trade Commission’s Fair Information Practice Principles. Notably, those include (i) consumer notice and awareness (“Consumers should be given notice of an entity’s information practices before any personal information is collected from them”), and (ii) consumer choice and consent (“In order to be effective, any choice regime should provide a simple and easily-accessible way for consumers to exercise their choice”). If the vast majority of websites utilize privacy policies which consumers are willfully ignoring or otherwise failing to recognize the existence of, much less comprehending their contents, how can one reasonably claim consumers are “on notice and aware” of privacy policies and exercising real “choice and consent” to the management of their personal data?
Continue Reading You Read the Privacy Policy, Right? Sure You Did. A New Federal Bill Seeks to Address the Transparency Gap.

With the focus rightly on the challenges presented by COVID-19, it is also important to keep an eye on what is happening in the world of data privacy and security regulation. One such development involves a little known application of a financial services privacy law to the world of higher education.

On Feb. 28, 2020, the Federal Student Aid office (“FSA”) of the Department of Education (the “DoE”) posted an Electronic Announcement, advising all entities with an active Program Participation Agreement with the DoE (“Institutions”) that the DoE will begin strictly enforcing the requirement that each Institution must comply with the data privacy and cybersecurity requirements set forth in 16 C.F.R. Part 314 and administered by the Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”).

Although all Institutions have been subject to these compliance requirements for some time (technical application dates back to 2003, and auditing requirements date back to 2016), enforcement actions by the DoE and FTC in the wake of non-compliant audits have been lacking. No longer. According to FSA, that’s about the change.

Continue Reading Higher Education Institutions Must Be Prepared: “Enhanced” Cybersecurity Audits are Coming