On July 1, 2014, the first provisions of the Canadian Anti-Spam Law (“CASL”) will come into effect. CASL intends to address the e-mail “spam” problem, where spam is undesired commercial electronic messages (“CEMs”), by requiring that recipients of CEMs to consent to their receipt, either expressly or implicitly. CASL covers the sending of CEMs to all Canadian persons, the unsolicited installation of computer programs, and the alteration of transmitted data by third parties (c

By: Aaron Krowne In 2013, the California Legislature passed AB 370, an addition to California’s path-blazing online consumer privacy protection law in 2003, the California Online Privacy Protection Act (“CalOPPA”). AB 370 took effect January 1, 2014, and adds new requirements to CalOPPA pertaining to consumers’ use of Do-Not-Track (DNT) signals in their web browsers (all major web browsers now include this capability). CalOPPA applies to any website, online service, and mobi

John Hancock…Is That Really You? All too often, documents such as contracts, wills or promissory notes, are contested based on allegations of fraudulent or forged signatures. Indeed, our office once handled a two-week arbitration based solely on the issue of authentication of a signature on a contract. Fortunately, a quick, simple and inexpensive solution to prevent this problem is to have the document notarized by a notary public (“Notary”). A notarization, or a notarial act

Entrepreneurs often struggle with what they should and should not say to potential investors, especially given that investors often will refuse to sign a non-disclosure agreement. Disclose too little information about your start-up or idea and you may fail to interest an investor. By the same token, disclose too much and you may expose yourself to an unacceptable level of risk. Eileen Zimmerman wrote a fantastic article explaining why more start-ups are sharing ideas without

By: Aaron Krowne You may have heard quite a bit of buzz about “Google Glass” in the past few years – and if you aren’t already intimately familiar with it, you probably at least know it is a new technology from Google that involves a “computer and camera” grafted onto otherwise standard eyeglasses. Indeed, this basic picture is correct, and itself is enough to suggest some interesting (and to some, upsetting) legal and societal questions. What is Google Glass? Google Glass, f

By: Aaron Krowne On June 20, 2014, the Florida legislature passed SB 1524, the Florida Information Protection Act of 2014 (“FIPA”). The law updates Florida’s existing data breach law, creating one of the strongest laws in the nation protecting consumer personal data through the use of strict transparency requirements. FIPA applies to any entity with customers (or users) in Florida – so businesses with a national reach should take heed. Overview of FIPA FIPA requires any cover

By: Aaron Krowne In this post we briefly introduce a key aspect of the right to privacy – the reasonable expectation of privacy (“REP”) – and discuss the impact of the recent US Supreme Court decisions in Riley v. California and US v. Wurie on it, with implications for digital information privacy. A Game-Changer? The Supreme Court’s recent ruling on July 25, 2014 in the paired cases Riley v. California and United States v. Wurie represents a major development on the REP front

By: Aaron Krowne In a major recent case testing California’s medical information privacy law, part of the California Medical Information Act, or CMIA (California Civil Code § 56 et seq.), the Third District Court of Appeals in Sutter Health v. Superior Court held on July 21, 2014 that confidential information covered by the law must be “actually viewed” for the statutory penalty provisions of the law to apply. The implication of this decision is that it just got harder for co

By: Aaron Krowne On July 1, 2014, Delaware signed into law HB 295, which provides for the “safe destruction of records containing personal identifying information” (codified at Chapter 50C, Title 6, Subtitle II, of the Delaware Code). The law goes into effect January 1, 2015. Overview of Delaware’s Data Destruction Law In brief, the law requires a commercial entity to take reasonable steps to destroy or arrange for the destruction of consumers’ personal identifying informatio