Week 10 Takeaways

1.      A jury awarded Hulk Hogan $150 million in his sex tape case. $55 million for economic harm, $60 million for emotional distress, and $25 million for punitive damages against Gawker and Nick Denson, the owner of Gawker. It’s likely that the judge will reduce the amount of money given to him because Gawker will argue that the amount the jury awarded is far in excess of how much the tape actually hurt him and because there was some evidence that was not displayed in court. I didn’t know that judges could reduce the amount of money given to someone by a jury.

2.      An Exabyte is the largest unit of information that we have. It is equal to 1 billion gigabytes. Up until 2003, we had produced 5 exabytes total. Now we produce 5 exabytes every ten minutes. That number will keep increasing as more and more things become internet based like our cars, houses, thermostats, etc. Maybe we will even have to come up with another “byte” measurement larger than exabytes.

3.      A study done with nameless Facebook posts was able to reidentify people with a 95% accuracy, given 3 other data points about the person combined with their Facebook posts. This is important because we have been talking in class a lot about whether or not data can accurately be linked back to people and what kind of protection/anonymization that data needs. We also learned that there is a difference between information that personally identifies you as an individual and aggregate data that is not linked directly with a person. 

4.      HB 300 passed which states that law enforcement must come up with written policies about their use of body cameras within their work. There are minimum standards about their usage based off the legislation, beyond that the cities must come up with their own. According to the bill, the footage is not classified as public or private and law enforcement must balance between public and private interest on a case by case basis.

5.      HB 358 passed as well. This recognized that the existing laws in regards to student privacy are insufficiently protective. It requires the state board of education to develop a data governance plan mainly focused on security. The educational institution must have a data management plan and the vendors they utilize must have adequate privacy safeguards as well. It also creates a state student data officer and recognizes that individually identifiable data is owned by the individual student.

6.      We discussed the challenges that go into creating regulations for data brokers like what exactly are data brokers, transparency between the brokers and the consumers, access to the data, sensitive information, inferences made based off the data, incorrect inferences, data security standards, consent, consumer education, and enforcement. The Data Broker Access and Transparency Act is a federal bill that is designed to get the ball rolling as far as regulating data brokers goes. A lot of their solution is based around a website that outlines standards and punishments for data brokers, as well as a consumer education section for the public.