Yeah, this is not great. This is yet more case law basically saying don’t bother suing federal agents because, unless they’ve very specifically done the same thing other federal agents have been held accountable for, they’re just going to walk away from lawsuits. The Supreme Court’s 1971 Bivens decision may have created a cause of […]
Back in 2015, the nation’s top telecom regulator attempted to create some very basic (by international standards) privacy guidelines for telecom providers, demanding they do things like (gasp) be transparent about the consumer data they were collecting and selling, while also requiring that consumers (gasp) opt in to the sale of any particularly sensitive data. […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is That One Guy with a comment about the FBI advisor who attacked Signal for its refusal to collect user metadata: ‘How dare you close the curtains, I was looking in those!’ I love how a company that collects as little as possible information on […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2018 (yes, 2018 is now five years ago) Comcast rang in the new year with a flurry of price increases while we looked at what the death of net neutrality would bring as California joined the list of states proposing their own net neutrality rules. At the same time, […]
For years, we’ve written about the copyright nonsense around sampling in hip hop music, and how it was treated with very, very different rules than things like cover songs and paying homage to previous artists in other forms of music. As we’ve mentioned for over a decade, filmmaker Kembrew McCleod did a full (fascinating) exploration […]
In April 2020, the Supreme Court of the United States issued a ruling that made things clear to the two states (Oregon and Louisiana) still inexplicably allowing people to be convicted by non-unanimous juries: to continue to do so violated the Sixth Amendment rights of the accused. The only two states affected applied the ruling, […]
For years, I’ve been highlighting the overwhelming evidence that non-compete agreements are horrible for innovation. There are multiple studies on this, which show how much of Silicon Valley’s success can be attributed to an almost accidental interpretation of the California business code that outlawed non-compete agreements, while other studies have strongly suggested that a big […]
Cops like science. Not in the way that say, scientists like science. They just like science-y sounding mumbo jumbo that paves the way for criminal convictions. And, sure, maybe you’re thinking this only applies to backwoods agencies that prefer to use a combination of Aunt Cleo and questionable testimony to lock people up. But it’s […]
Last summer, I mocked the EU a bit for setting up a new office in Silicon Valley, and sending an official here to “liaise with Silicon Valley companies affected by EU tech regulation,” noting how it felt weird to have EU internet police setting up shop in Silicon Valley. Given that, I was a bit […]
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For years, governments around the world have deployed powerful malware to hack the phones of their targets. Most of these deployments went unnoticed, as many governments were less interested in performing oversight than pursuing ends (read: wars on terror, drugs) they felt justified the means. But as people began coming forward with evidence of suspected […]
You might recall how AT&T spent nearly $200 billion on megamergers thinking it was going to dominate the online video advertising space. But after spending a fortune on DirecTV and Time Warner, laying off 50,000 people, and killing off popular properties like Mad Magazine, it quickly became clear that AT&T executives had absolutely no idea what they […]
Back in December we discussed how Nintendo got a video on the DidYouKnowGaming YouTube channel taken down via a DMCA notice. While Nintendo is notorious for being an intellectual property bully and enforcing what it thinks are its rights in as draconian a manner as possible, what stood out about this particular story is that […]
We’ve spent years criticizing many politicians, especially in Congress, for trying to regulate technology that they don’t seem to understand and often falling prey to wild moral panics about the technology. That’s why it’s quite refreshing to see this story that the Washington Post had in the waning days of 2022 about Rep. Don Beyer, […]
One of the common themes here at Techdirt over the last decade is how the very meaning of “ownership” and “property” has changed — often for the worse. In the broadband connected era, firmware updates can often eliminate functionality promised to you at launch, as we saw with the Sony PlayStation 3. And with everything now […]
Recently, Apple announced some quality of life updates for services and devices used by millions. The company opted to give its users more privacy and security by offering them the option to fully encrypt data stored in its cloud service. For years, iCloud accounts have been the endaround for encrypted devices, allowing law enforcement (and […]
Some big news out of the EU this week as the Irish data protection authority has fined Meta over $400 million, claiming it violated the GDPR. The full details of the ruling are not yet out (apparently, the officials are working with Meta over what needs to be redacted — which is not out of […]
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There’s only so much domestic surveillance the government can engage in before it starts running into problems. The Supreme Court’s Carpenter decision strongly suggested gathering data in bulk to track people might run afoul of the Fourth Amendment. Lower courts have delivered a variety of opinions on the subject. Meanwhile, a few privacy-oriented legislators are […]
For much of the last year, European telecom giants have been pushing for a tax on Big Tech company profits. They’ve tried desperately to dress it up as a reasonable adult policy proposal, but it’s effectively just the same thing we saw during the U.S. net neutrality wars: telecom monopolies demanding other people pay them […]
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