Eric J. Sinrod – Page 22 – Duane Morris TechLaw

July 9, 2013July 18, 2016 by Eric J. Sinrod

COPPA Now Includes Greater Protections For Kids Online

Last week, you were informed about the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) updating advertising disclosure guidance for search engines. But there’s more! On July 1, new FTC rules went into effect that are intended to provide greater privacy protection for children online. Indeed, the rules are supposed to afford increased safeguards when it comes to data such as geo-location and social media information.

By way of background, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) became operative in 2000, in the early days of the commercial Internet. The law was designed to enable parents to control personal information collected from these young children in hopes that COPPA would prevent children under the age of 13 from being targeted via personalized online marketing messages.

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July 2, 2013July 18, 2016 by Eric J. Sinrod

FTC Updates Advertising Disclosure Guidance For Search Engines

Back at the dawn of the commercial Internet era in 2002, the Federal Trade Commission provided guidance to search engines in terms of differentiating between true search results and advertisements. However, over the past 11 years, the FTC has determined that search results and advertisements have become less distinguishable from each other.

Accordingly, in correspondence recently sent to major search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo and AOL, the FTC has updated its 2002 guidance.

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June 25, 2013July 18, 2016 by Eric J. Sinrod

White House Enlists Help To Get Hip To Cyber Legal Issues

Back in the day, President Bill Clinton touted the development of the “information superhighway,” and Vice President Al Gore not entirely accurately was reported to have stated that he had invented the Internet.

Since then, the Internet has exploded and grown exponentially. There have been many benefits, such as the potential to purchase a tremendous number of goods and services online, as well as the ability to communicate freely via social media portals such as Facebook and Twitter.

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June 11, 2013July 18, 2016 by Eric J. Sinrod

DDoS Attacks, ‘Zombie’ Sites On The Rise

Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks are not hypothetical possibilities. Indeed, they have been bringing down Web sites for quite some time.

Most recently, two men in Britain have been sent to prison for their DDoS attacks perpetrated on PayPal and other sites, according to InformationWeek.

The InformationWeek article notes that six people were arrested in connection with these DDoS attacks. Three of them ultimately were charged under the United Kingdom’s Computer Misuse Act of 1990. Of these three, the head of the group received a prison sentence of 18 months, another was sentenced to seven months in jail, and the third was sentenced to six months in jail which was suspended for two years while he was ordered to serve 100 hours of community service.

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June 4, 2013July 18, 2016 by Eric J. Sinrod

New WTO Information Technology Agreement May Do Away With Duties

The imposition of duties on the global trade of technology products is significant from a monetary standpoint.

However, Reuters reports that a potential agreement among the United States, China, the European Union and almost two dozen other countries that could eliminate billions of dollars of such duties might be achieved as soon as within the next two months.

At issue is the negotiation of a possible expansion of the World Trade Organization’s Information Technology Agreement. The Agreement is a pact from the late 1990s that ended duties on a wide array of technology products. These products include laptops, computers, telephones, fax machines, software, semi-conductors and some office machines.

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May 21, 2013July 18, 2016 by Eric J. Sinrod

From Crackberry Addict To iPhone Junkie: A Lawyer’s Tale

Up until recently, and for years, I was a lawyer addicted to his BlackBerry. My BlackBerry always was on my hip, ready for immediate use. I became so proficient that I literally could type as fast with two thumbs on the device as I could with all of my fingers on my desktop keyboard at work. But other attorneys kept whispering in my ear, “Try the iPhone — once you do, you will never go back to the BlackBerry.”

So, over the New Year holiday, I tried my daughter’s iPhone. I must say, I was most intrigued by Siri and the voice-recognition feature, not to mention the much larger screen.

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May 8, 2013July 18, 2016 by Eric J. Sinrod

Worker’s Firings Over Facebook Complaints Were Improper: NLRB

In the case Design Tech. Grp. LLC d/b/a Bettie Page Clothing, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has ruled that employees of a clothing company were improperly terminated based on comments they made on Facebook complaining about their supervisor and expressing their workplace concerns.

According to the administrative law judge’s ruling, which was appealed to the NLRB, workers at Bettie Page Clothing engaged in the following exchange on Facebook:

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April 30, 2013July 18, 2016 by Eric J. Sinrod

The Death of the Tax-Free Internet?

Last week, by virtue of a 63-30 procedural vote, the Senate moved forward with a bill called the Marketplace Fairness Act, with a final Senate vote set for May 6, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The bill, if it were to become law, would enable states to force online sellers nationally to collect sales tax with respect to their residents’ purchases.

In the past, online sellers were not in favor of the imposition of sales taxes on Internet transactions — indeed, these sellers had a competitive advantage over brick-and-mortar sellers, because purchases from online sellers were cheaper for buyers due to the lack of imposed taxes.

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April 23, 2013July 18, 2016 by Eric J. Sinrod

Cybersecurity Bill Passes The House, But What’s Next?

The House has approved the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA, H.R. 624). CISPA allows private companies and the federal government to exchange information relating to cybersecurity threats.

The bill was passed in the face of some concerns that it might provide private consumer information to the government. According to Reuters, President Obama has threatened to veto the bill on the basis that it supposedly does not mandate that companies take the greatest efforts to remove personal information before providing it to the government.

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