EPIC

On April 24th, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (“EPIC”) and a coalition of 37 other civil society groups sent a letter urging the Federal Communications Commission (“FCC”) to act on an August 2015 petition to repeal the FCC’s data retention mandate under 47 C.F.R. §42.6 (“Retention of Telephone Toll Records”).

The mandate requires communications carriers that “offer[] or bill[] toll telephone service” to retain the following customer billing records for a period of 18 months: (1) the “name, address, and telephone number of the caller,” (2) the “telephone number called,” and (3) the “date, time, and length of the call.”  Carriers are required to retain such information regardless of whether they are billing their own toll service customers or billing customers for another carrier.
Continue Reading Advocacy Groups Urge FCC to End Data Retention Mandate

An action brought by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (“EPIC”) asking that the FTC be compelled to enforce its Google Buzz consent order (previously described, here) was dismissed by Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, who held that “enforcement decisions are committed to agency discretion and are not subject to judicial review.”

EPIC contended that Google’s announced changes to its user privacy policies for all of its services, scheduled to take effect on March 1, 2012, would violate various portions of the consent order Google reached with the FTC regarding its former social networking service Google Buzz by “altering the use of personal information” obtained by users and “consolidat[ing] user data from across [Google’s] services and creat[ing] a single merged profile for each user.”Continue Reading No Federal Court Jurisdiction to Review FTC Enforcement of Google Buzz Consent Decree, Judge Rules

As we previously reported, the Video Privacy Protection Act reform bill sponsored by Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) passed the House.  And now the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law has scheduled a hearing on video privacy, to be held next Tuesday, January 31.

The…
Continue Reading Senate Privacy Subcommittee Schedules Video Privacy Hearing