Generative AI – ChatGPT for example. Have you considered how generative AI collects our personal information to provide its benefits in ways that can do us wrong? What can we do about the risks? How should legislators and regulators balance AI’s benefits with our rights to personal privacy?

Rita Garry, a Chicago attorney with the firm of Howard & Howard Attorneys, PLLC, provides data privacy and cybersecurity services with a view to the specifics of each client. Tune in to learn what Generative AI is, how it affects individual privacy, what the recently announced White House five principles for AI regulation are, and what organizations and individuals can do about generative AI. 

Time stamps:

05:35 — White House’s AI Bill of Rights

14:00 — Advice on how we can decide how AI uses our data

July 2023 was hot – record setting global temperatures. Likewise in the data privacy world. Tune in for an exploration of three top topics in data privacy by Frost Brown Todd’s Yugo Nagashima and Brian St. Amour with the Data Privacy Detective.

Illinois – major Supreme Court decision from the first state to adopt a biometric data privacy law – raising the stakes for businesses in using biometrics in the workplace.

U.S./EU – a third attempt to facilitate personal data flows between the European Union and the United States is deemed “adequate” by the EU – will it work despite two prior failures? What’s the new option for U.S. businesses?

The United Kingdom’s draft Online Safety Bill and Apple’s threat to leave the UK – what’s behind this battle between freedom and law & order in social media? Why is Apple threatening to leave the UK market rather than submit to new proposed rules that would require it to give the UK government a backdoor entry to end-to-end pro-privacy encryption?

Time stamps:
00:40 — Illinois
05:47 — U.S./EU
14:22 — UK

Our personal data is collected, sold, shared, used, and misused in ways most of us cannot imagine. Data brokers that buy and sell our personal information (“PI”) do it behind the scenes and almost always without our knowledge or consent. Data brokers are largely unregulated. What can be done about perils that have led to murder, theft, and other mayhem through easy access to PI?

Tom Daly, CEO of MePrism, takes us on a tour of the consumer privacy landscape. A consumer data privacy company, MePrism programmatically removes people’s sensitive information from the internet. Explore what can be done to protect individuals from swatting, doxxing, and other misuse of their personal information, early state and federal steps towards regulating data sales and sharing, and measures that organizations and individuals can take to prevent mal-actors from gaining ready access to our PI.

Who owns our personal data? As technology advances in Web 3.0, traditional software and claims of third parties over what they can do with our personal data are under challenge. Join Chris Were, co-founder and chief architect of the Australian company Verida, to consider how blockchain thinking can allow us to achieve self-sovereign identity. Explore in Episode 132 what this means and how we can take better control of our digital presence.

Understand the meaning of self-sovereign identity, how it aims to secure sensitive information about ourselves and to put us in control of how our digital footprints are used and shared with others. Learn the role of zero-knowledge credentials and how a crypto wallet holding our personal information functions. Explore how digital assistants we engage could help us control our personal information as AI scrapes, stores, employs, and adapts our data in ways we may not approve.

Oregon, California, and TikTok top the list of data privacy developments of June 2023. Tune in for how Oregon’s new data privacy statute blends the best of California and other state statutes for a comprehensive code and adds a unique twist about who can enforce it. Learn how a California court extended the effective date of a California agency’s regulations drafted to implement the Golden State’s pioneering California Consumer Privacy Act. Consider a whistleblower’s sworn testimony that contradicts TikTok’s long-held position that it does not and will not share personal data of TikTok users with the Chinese Government, despite Chinese law intended to require such reporting on demand.

In concise analysis that digs beneath the deadlines, Yugo Nagashima and Brion St. Amour, attorneys on the Data Security and Privacy Team of Frost Brown Todd LLP, share their insights with that of the Data Privacy Detective. Join our podcasts on the first Thursday of each month to probe three top developments from the prior month.

Time Stamps:
01:04 — Oregon
05:41 — California
08:32 — TikTok

Employers and employees – how much privacy is there in the workplace? Episode 130 explores this question in the United States. What’s an employee’s reasonable expectation of privacy while working? How do federal and state laws limit employer surveillance of employee activity? What limits are there to an employer’s monitoring of employee use of company time and property? 

Employees use company-provided computers, phones, and other property for a variety of personal purposes, often injecting personal information through a company’s IT system. What should employers and employees do about this? And what about departing and former employees – to what extent can or should an employer monitor a departing employee’s data streams or keep a former employee’s personal information?

Annee Duprey, a partner in the Labor & Employment Group of Frost Brown Todd LLP in its Columbus office, and Seth Granda, a senior associate in the firm’s Nashville, Tennessee office, tour this complicated and challenging terrain and offer top tips to both employers and employees. 

Time stamps:

01:20 — What is a reasonable expectation for employee privacy in the US workplace?

08:18 — Are there limits to what kind of monitoring employers can conduct on their employees?

14:35 — What limitations are there for employees on what they can do with company-provided devices?

20:15 — Top tips for employees and employers?

What happens to our personal information after death? What can we or society do about whether any privacy exists for dead people?

Episode 129 considers post-death privacy. Data privacy laws are largely for and about the living and give scant attention to the dead. But a few extend to protect data privacy after death, regarding medical information and dignitary interests of decedents and families. It’s not quite a free-for-all.

Consider how estate plans generally ignore a person’s digital data but could be written to address this important interest. Learn how laws could be crafted to protect the reputational and other interests of deceased persons. Hear how technology can be used to create a digital avatar and project a person’s immortal presence for interactive conversations with great grandchildren and beyond. Think how you might wish to preserve your private information beyond your lifetime.

Our personal medical information is sensitive. It becomes digital data shared beyond the medical professional who requests and needs it to provide care. Learn how our medical information is shared and used in ways that create privacy risks many of us do not wish to assume, how tech companies profit from its use, how federal and state law provide rules about medical privacy, and what companies and individuals can do about the subject.

Our guest Jay Barnes is an attorney with the firm of Simmons Hanly Conroy, which represents consumers and local governments in mass tort and class actions. Jay shares insight into how tech companies collect and use personal medical information to generate profits through customized advertising we may or may not wish to receive. He explores how the underlying principle should be that of giving each person the freedom to choose whether individual medical data can be shared with and used by third parties. Tune in for a segment about what businesses should do to comply with law and earn a privacy-centric reputation and what each of us can do to increase the privacy of our medical data. 

Time stamps:

00:56 — How is medical data digitized and shared?

05:10 — How do state laws deal with medical data privacy?

10:04 — How can a balance between personal data privacy and public health data be struck?

14:22 — Advice for businesses on how to handle consumer medical data responsibly and safely?

16:16 — Advice for individuals on keeping their medical data secure

Get the latest on data privacy news from May 2023.

Meta is fined about $1.3 billion for transferring European personal data to the States. But what’s underneath this record fine? What does it mean for how personal data rules are enforced in the EU? Are EU standard contractual clauses no longer a safe harbor for trans-Atlantic business?

Washington adopts a data privacy law for health data. Will this be copied by other states as part of the ebb and flow since Roe v. Wade’s overturning?

Texas adopts a comprehensive data privacy code. How does it differ from other states with personal data privacy statutes? What does it portend as this mega-state becomes the tenth state to adopt an overall approach to personal data privacy?

Tune in to Episode 127 to join the conversation.

Time stamps:

00:14 — Meta fined by Ireland

09:10 — Washington State’s new data privacy law

15:00 — Texas’s new data privacy code

Bail decisions are critical in the lives of arrested persons. They come without judgment of guilt or innocence but can mean the deprivation of freedom for individuals as they await trial. But they can also have crushing unintended consequences for persons who become the victims of persons released without bail or on insufficient bail.

Episode 126 takes no position on the headline debates about bail reform. Instead, Ken W. Good takes us on a tour of the privacy issues involved with bail. A thirty-plus-year attorney, Ken is on the board of directors of the Professional Bondsmen of Texas, the voice of the bail industry in that state. What information does a magistrate or judge obtain when deciding on bail? What personal information about the accused individual is available, and does this data become available to the public? Is setting bail an open court matter? Is AI entering the courtroom through algorithms that make risk assessments about accused persons? Tune in to consider this critical stage of the criminal justice system and how the privacy of all of us is affected.

Time stamps:

01:06 — What is the bail bondsman's view of bail and potential bail reform?

02:34 — What are the privacy issues of bail?

05:40 — What data is presented before a magistrate in determining bail?

08:52 — Is the bail decision a public record? 

10:15 — Are A.I. and algorithms being used in bail determinations? 

12:07 — How might bail decisions evolve in the next 5-10 years?