That Massive Privacy Settlement for Fortnite

Like so many other adults in this world, I have children who play Fortnite. When they play, they ignore me. This gives me time for other pursuits, such as reading the massive enforcement action and compliance reforms that the feds just imposed on Fortnite. You may have seen the headlines already. Epic Games, the owner…

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SEC Reminders on Identity Theft

disclosure

The Securities and Exchange Commission has published a review of financial firms’ identity theft programs, in case anyone is looking for helpful hints and tips on how to strengthen your own program. Most of the SEC’s advice, however, boils down to a company sincerely thinking about its risks here. The advice came in the form…

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Morgan Stanley Fined on Data Destruction

Morgan Stanley

We have quite the reminder on IT risk today courtesy of the Securities and Exchange Commission. The agency just fined a subsidiary of Morgan Stanley for poor data protection practices, which even led to one incident where the bank’s old IT equipment was sold at auction with customer data still on the hard drives.  The…

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Roe Falls; Compliance Programs Brace

roe

They say that a columnist writes about what people are talking about, so there’s only one thing to write about today: the immense implications of the Supreme Court’s decision to invalidate Roe v. Wade. Even at this early stage, the consequences for corporate ethics and compliance programs are emerging fast and furious.  We can begin…

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Study: California Privacy Compliance a Mess

privacy

A new research report says the vast majority of companies are not prepared to comply with the California Consumer Privacy Act, with nearly 90 percent of businesses either fumbling along with manual processes or just not in compliance at all.  So says Cytrio, a privacy compliance software vendor that published the report on Wednesday, after…

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Microsoft, Activision and Antitrust Issues

OK, Microsoft has proposed acquiring Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion. Now comes the parlor game of analyzing the ethics and compliance issues involved in this mammoth deal, and two arise right away: surviving regulatory scrutiny, and repairing Activision’s defective corporate culture. We can begin with the regulatory scrutiny, because this deal captures so many current…

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FTC Serves MoviePass Its Final Scene

moviepass

The folks behind MoviePass have agreed to settle charges with the Federal Trade Commission that the business worked to subvert customers’ ability to use the film subscription service and failed to protect personal data, in a messy case that’s quite the example of poor leadership and poor privacy compliance all rolled into one. For those…

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Zoom and FTC Enforcement to Come

Zoom

A few weeks ago the Federal Trade Commission took an enforcement action against Zoom Technologies for misleading statements Zoom made about the security of its videoconferencing services. The case wasn’t too exciting except for a dissenting statement from one of the Democratic FTC commissioners — which read like a foreshadowing of cybersecurity enforcement in the…

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Facebook, Power, and Antitrust Issues

facebook

Compliance officers have a lot to consider about this week’s news that Facebook will pay $5.1 billion in penalties and implement a raft of procedures to improve its privacy compliance. Above all, however, consider this: the market didn’t care.  It didn’t. While we were all busy analyzing what Facebook’s settlements with the Federal Trade Commission…

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Nine Compliance Issues for 2019

2019

Welcome to 2019, everyone! The federal government may be shut down, but corporate compliance never stops. Now that we’re done returning Christmas presents and deleting emails clogging our in-boxes, our thoughts turn to how the corporate compliance landscape might evolve in the coming year. Without further delay, then, my annual list of compliance issues that…

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