Greetings from Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
This week was marked by some good news on the COVID-19 front, as several states, including New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Michigan, have started to experience a decrease in new cases of the novel coronavirus. Unfortunately, in many others, such as Illinois, Texas, and Georgia, the IAPP’s home state of New Hampshire and neighboring Maine, there have been increases. Meanwhile, cases have flattened in several large states, such as California, Pennsylvania, and Florida, according to The New York Times.
Yet, despite the pandemic, there seems to have been no slowdown of activity in the world of privacy. Rather, news at the intersection of the COVID-19 pandemic and privacy continued to dominate headlines this week.
Across the pond, the U.K. government revealed details about a contact tracing app that is part of its plan to rescind lockdown measures. On Tuesday, the app went live on the Isle of Wight for preliminary testing before it is rolled out nationwide. Yesterday, however, the U.K. Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights published a report that noted that there remain “significant concerns regarding surveillance and the impact on other human rights which must be addressed first.”
Closer to home, on Monday, Star Wars Day ("May the 4th be with you"), Californians for Consumer Privacy announced that it has begun submitting more than 900,000 signatures in order to add the California Privacy Rights Act to the November 2020 ballot — no small feat in the era of social distancing! The IAPP published an Sipra” is the way to go!
I hope you all have a nice weekend.