Privacy & Information Security Law Blog

On December 12, 2024, the French Data Protection Authority announced that it had issued notices to several organizations ordering them to modify the cookie banners on their websites to bring them into compliance.

On December 17, 2024, the Irish Data Protection Commission announced that it concluded two inquiries initiated following a personal data breach reported in 2018 affecting Meta Platforms Ireland Limited.

The Colorado Attorney General announced the adoption of the draft amendments on December 5, 2024, and the adopted rules were filed with the Secretary of State and the Office of Legislative Legal Services on December 17, 2024. The amendments underwent minor clarifying changes prior to the Department of Law hearing, and in response to comments and testimony received during the public comment period.

In December 2024, the Centre for Information Policy Leadership at Hunton Andrews Kurth published a discussion paper titled, “Applying Data Protection Principles to Generative AI: Practical Approaches for Organizations and Regulators.”

On December 5, 2024, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (“HHS”) Office for Civil Rights (“OCR”) announced a penalty of $548,265 against Children’s Hospital Colorado (“CHC”) in connection with a series of alleged data breaches that occurred in 2017 and 2020. In September 2017, CHC reported to OCR a phishing attack that compromised an employee’s email account. OCR’s investigation revealed that the breach occurred because multi-factor authentication was disabled on the employee’s email account. According to OCR, the second breach in April 2020 occurred in part because two workforce members provided unknown third parties with access to their email accounts by accepting a multi-factor authentication access request that neither individual had initiated. OCR also determined that CHC violated the HIPAA Privacy Rule’s requirement to train workforce members on the HIPAA Privacy Rule and the HIPAA Security Rule’s requirements regarding conducting risk analyses to determine the risks and vulnerabilities to ePHI in an organization’s systems.

The telehealth and prescription drug discount provider, GoodRx, recently agreed to pay $25 million to settle class action claims originating from the company’s unauthorized disclosure of consumers’ personal health information, according to recent filings with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

On December 6, 2024, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upheld the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, which is set to take effect on January 19, 2025, and make the distribution of TikTok illegal in the U.S. if parent company ByteDance has not divested. The D.C. Circuit is now considering a request for emergency injunction pending Supreme Court review. 

On December 3, 2024, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission published a proposed consent order that would settle its investigation into IntelliVision Technologies Corp. for making false, misleading or unsubstantiated claims regarding a lack of gender or racial bias in its AI-powered facial recognition technology.

In November 2024, the Department of Commerce’s Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute established a new taskforce to research and test AI models in areas critical to national security and public safety, while ODNI released guidance on the acquisition and use of foundation AI models, both part of the national security community’s response to the directives of the recent White House AI Memo and Executive Order 14110.

On December 3, 2024, the European Data Protection Board published its draft Guidelines 02/2024 on Article 48 of the GDPR, which focus on how a controller should act when subject to a judgment or administrative decision requiring the transfer or disclosure of personal data to a public authority in a third country.