The Whirlwind Week - Regulating Ant, Settling Zoom, Re-envisioning Data Transfers and Coding a Dystopia 

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Privacy, Technology and Perspective

The Whirlwind Week: Regulating Ant, Settling Zoom, Re-envisioning Data Transfers and Coding a Dystopia.  This week saw a whirlwind of privacy and technology developments across the globe, and we’ll highlight them here:

China’s Xi Jinping personally halted Ant Group’s IPO and ordered Chinese banking regulators to investigate Ant’s offering. Ant’s plans call for it to perform many of the services of a traditional bank, but up to now, it hasn’t been subject to capitalization requirements like traditional banks are. To be able to offer the services of a traditional bank without a traditional bank’s capitalization and other requirements would certainly make Ant more valuable, but also riskier, especially for the economy it serves. We sense that things are about to change, and that tighter regulations with regard to capitalization and micro-lending are coming soon for Ant (along with a substantially decreased valuation for the Ant Group company).  To read more on this important development, you can click on the following link:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-antgroup-ipo/chinese-president-xi-jinping-decided-to-halt-ants-ipo-wsj-idUSKBN27S31I

Zoom settled with the FTC over allegations of “deceptive” security practices by, in part, agreeing to a comprehensive information security program that includes annually assessing and documenting any potential security risks, and developing ways to safeguard against such risks, regular security training, and deploying technical safeguards like multi-factor authentication.  A link to the FTC’s announcement – which contains a link to the proposed settlement – follows:

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2020/11/ftc-requires-zoom-enhance-its-security-practices-part-settlement

The European Data Protection Board (EDBP) issued recommendations following the Schrems II decision regarding supplementary data transfer tools to facilitate cross-border data transfers A link to those recommendations follows:

https://edpb.europa.eu/sites/edpb/files/consultation/edpb_recommendations_202001_supplementarymeasurestransferstools_en.pdf

The following article from “The National Law Review” provides a neat summary of the recommendations:

https://www.natlawreview.com/article/edpb-adopts-recommendations-supplementary-measures-data-transfers-following-schrems

The Chinese company, Dahua, has developed software that identifies and helps to track China’s minority Uighur population.  To learn more, you can click on the following link:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/dahua-amazon-partner-in-china-is-making-facial-recognition-tech-to-track-uyghurs 

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Hosch & Morris, PLLC is a Dallas-based boutique law firm dedicated to data protection, privacy, the Internet and technology. Open the Future℠.

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