You may remember that, last September, we told you about a 9th Circuit decision holding that Google violated federal Wiretap Act when it collected individual consumers' unencrypted wi-fi data while capturing "Street View" photographs. Here's what the 9th Circuit said at the time: In the course of capturing its Street View photographs, Google collected data […]
NPR reporter Steve Henn (who has covered both economics and technology) conducted an experiment: he asked a couple computer experts to follow his internet traffic for a week and see how much they could learn. The answer? A whole lot. They ended up knowing so much about Henn and his movements that they could have […]
by Jeff Sovern In its ongoing efforts to weaken the CFPB and consumer protection generally, the House Financial Services Comittee's Subcommittee on Financial institutions and Consumer Credit held a hearing on May 21 on eleven bills. I will talk in this post about only one, the so-called ‘‘Preventing Regulatory Abuse Act of 2014, sponsored by Representative Barr. As regular […]
When a group of class-action objectors appealed the settlement of the privacy case against Facebook for (among other things) the unlawful use of minors’ images for advertising without parental consent, class counsel sought to impose on each objector-appellant an appeal bond of $32,000. (For more background, see here.) One of class counsel’s arguments was that […]
As we've recounted, this is the case of the company that tried to litigate in secret and under a pseudonym in challenging the Consumer Product Safety Commission's decision to post a product report on its product safety database, saferproducts.gov. The district court granted the seal and permission to use a pseudonym, and at the same […]
Key holdings of today's 5-4 decision: corporations are entitled to protection under the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act; requiring closely-held corporations to pay for contraception despite their owners' have sincere religious objections is a substantial burden on religious freedom; government's program is not narrowly tailored. However, the majority opinion suggests that the Department of Health […]
As we hit the middle of the U.S. major-league baseball season, I wanted to update our readers on the latest baseball-related (but not baseball-inherent) tort. As any major-league baseball consumer knows, at many major-league stadiums, between innings, fans are bombarded with hot dogs (and/or t-shirts) propelled into the stands from large bazooka-style air guns. At […]
by Jeff Sovern Back in April, the American Tort Reform Association had a roundtable discussion about UDAP statutes with FTC Commissioner (and former George Mason professor) Joshua Wright, Joanna Shepherd-Bailey of Emory, Peter Holland of Maryland Law School, and Cary Silverman of Shook Hardy & Bacon. You can watch it here. Given the host, you […]
So says the Times. Not so much as before the Great Recession, and they're called non-qualified mortgages now, and maybe you can't get so-called "liar's loans" or negative amortization loans, but those with weak credit ratings can get mortgages again.
We posted yesterday about the New York Court of Appeals' decision invalidating the New York City Board of Health's ban on the sale of large sugary drinks. The Board of Health targeted sugar because it believed that the best science shows that excessive sugar consumption is at the root of the obesity epidemic. There's a […]