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Matthew Hays is an associate in Dykema’s Chicago Office and is an IAPP Certified Information Privacy Professional and registered patent attorney. Mr. Hays’s privacy and data security practice includes advising clients on issues of risk assessment, policies and procedures, corporate compliance projects, and drafting comprehensive website terms and conditions, privacy notices, and data sensitive vendor service agreements. He has also assisted clients in avoiding and addressing legal and regulatory exposure through prompt response to data security incidents. Mr. Hays has notable experience handling compliance matters related to the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Canadian Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA).

Effective January 1, 2023, companies subject to the California Consumer Privacy Act (“CCPA”) will face heightened compliance requirements when collecting personal information about their workers, business partners, and job applicants. The partial moratoriums in the CCPA that had applied to these data sets are set to expire, meaning that the CCPA will now apply with full force come the new year. Further, the California Privacy Rights Act (“CPRA”), which amends and reenacts the CCPA, becomes fully effective on January 1, 2023, and enforced beginning July 1, 2023, with a look-back period to January 1, 2022. The CPRA provides additional obligations and consumer data rights that will further complicate covered businesses’ compliance efforts with regard to the personal information of their employees and business contacts.

What were the partial exemptions?

Continue Reading CCPA/CPRA Set To Cover Employee, Job Applicant, and Business Personal Information: A Trap for the Unwary?

It has been impossible to ignore the constant spam of news articles detailing the epidemic of malicious attempts at data disruption and theft. While the cybersecurity risks of ransomware, malicious data extraction, and business e-mail compromise have been top of mind for professionals in heavily regulated industries for some time now, data from 2020 and the first half of 2021 compels an alarming new conclusion: cybercriminals are no longer a problem just for banks, health care organizations and oil pipelines to worry about. Businesses from a wide range of previously untargeted industries are now squarely in the cross-hairs of malicious threat actors.
Continue Reading Cybercriminals Finding Success In Targeting New Industries

Despite its unassuming name, the EARN IT Act has substantial cybersecurity implications, its relative obscurity in today’s coronavirus-obsessed headlines notwithstanding. The Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies (“EARN IT”) Act has already caught the ire of the collective internet and technology spheres due to its dramatic alteration of the safe harbor provisions of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (Title V of the Telecommunications Act Of 1996). Although still in the early stages of the legislative process, curbing Section 230’s protections has already garnered substantial support from leaders in both parties, including Joe Biden and Ted Cruz. Therefore, EARN IT’s progress merits close monitoring.
Continue Reading Putting in the Work: What Does the EARN IT Act Have in Store for Average Businesses

Passed in 2008, the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) regulates collection of biometric markers such as fingerprints or facial metrics. Since its passage, the Illinois BIPA has been used to restrict technology giants and their use of users’ personal information, particularly photographs. To understand the scale of this, Facebook reported in a 2013 whitepaper that its users have uploaded more than 250 billion photos. It was estimated in 2017 that the total number of digital photos stored in electronic databases was around 5 trillion.

Documenting and categorizing the faces of a significant percentage of the world’s population represents a major opportunity for technology and data companies. Ten years into enforcement and a figurative eternity into the technological evolution of the process, the Illinois BIPA has been an unavoidable feature of the big data landscape. Though potentially impactful cases remain pending (or on appeal), technology companies largely have been unable to convince courts that their facial recognition technologies should escape regulation under BIPA. 
Continue Reading Technology Defendants Continue to Test Whether the Illinois BIPA Law Can Cope with Modern Facial Recognition Technology