Proskauer's law firm blog covers internet law, including web scraping, the CFAA, privacy, blockchain, and copyright.
HN commenters cite it for legal context on scraping, the CFAA, and Plaid's privacy case, and for copyright disputes where answers are often 'maybe'.
"Probably the biggest lever a government has on their nation is monetary policy. There is no way that a government would allow the subversion of that."
This is a simplistic and wrong analysis. Governments care about the health of their economy, and as you said monetary policy is just one of many levers to influence that. Thus, if the cryptocurrency industry can help increase their economic wealth, they will not only allow it, but encourage the development of this industry and technologies. Case in point: various laws enacted or projects created by governments encourage blockchain/cryptocurrencies innovation & use:
https://www.americanbanker.com/news/delaware-blockchain-measure-seeks-to-change-very-base-of-financial-system
https://futurism.com/ethereums-founder-struck-a-deal-with-a-russian-bank-to-create-ethereum-russia/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitLicense
http://newmedialaw.proskauer.com/2017/04/20/arizona-passes-groundbreaking-blockchain-and-smart-contract-law-state-blockchain-laws-on-the-rise/
"So [China] went ahead and did what I have been suggesting would happen, but much earlier than I suspected."
No. Your point would have been demonstrated if China had banned cryptocurrencies. However this is precisely what they did NOT do. They only banned ICOs. The Chinese government cares enormously about stability and public order. They saw plenty of ICO scams and unregulated markets causing people to lose fortunes—not good for stability and order—so they banned ICOs.…
Yes, there have been notable CFAA prosecutions involving spamming activities. One significant case involved Power Ventures, which faced prosecution for both CFAA and CAN-SPAM violations. The company was sued by Facebook for sending promotional emails and messages through Facebook's platform without authorization[5][6].
The Department of Justice has recently revised its CFAA prosecution policies, particularly following significant court decisions that have narrowed the statute's interpretation. The DOJ now focuses on more clear-cut violations rather than mere terms of service violations[2][4].
For CFAA prosecution to proceed today, prosecutors must typically demonstrate that:
- The defendant was aware of specific access restrictions
- There were clear technological measures attempting to prevent unauthorized access
- The defendant knowingly circumvented these measures[4]
The cold email handbook clearly demonstrates how to circumvent Gmail’s limitations and the author is clearly aware that doing so violates their terms of service. So I would argue they are at risk of being prosecuted.
And as someone who runs a large email filtering service, I can tell you with some authority and confidence that the industry really loves helping law enforcement go after these groups.
Sources [1] CFAA Cases - NACDL https://www.nacdl.org/Content/CFAACases [2] Hacking the CFAA - Infosecurity Magazine https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/magazine-features/hacking-the-cfaa/ [3] The Most…
I just read the settlement document, and it looks like this is being reported incorrectly or at least ambiguously.
The allegation is NOT that they shared/sold data to any third parties but that their Plaid Link user interface, where people enter their banking information to add it to Plaid, looks like the customer's financial institution (i.e, uses the bank's branding colours and logo).
Because of this branding, people can reasonably assume that they are sending that data directly to their bank without knowledge, and therefore consent, to share their information with Plaid itself.
If that understanding is correct then this isn't a business practice or security issue, but a user consent issue. That's a problem that definitely needs to be fixed, and the injunctive relief requires them to change the branding and disclosure to make it clearer that people are interacting with Plaid rather than their bank.
But to me it's definitely not a reason to cancel your account or boycott Plaid or whatever.
https://newmedialaw.proskauer.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/22/2021/08/Plaid-Memorandum-of-Points-for-Prelimary-Settlement.pdf
> Plaid would retain access to their credentials and use them to mine, aggregate and then sell users’ financial transaction data to third parties (including to the fintech apps that use its services) for purposes unrelated to the plaintiffs’ use of the fintech payment apps. [1]
This is allegedly from the lawsuit. I can see your perspective — that it made sense to settle because of the privacy accusation, but you still deny the other accusations. I understand that perspective, though as I'm sure you can understand, it's hard to know for sure based on the allegations and the settlement.
[1] https://newmedialaw.proskauer.com/2021/05/11/plaid-federal-electronic-surveillance-claims-dropped-privacy-claims-survive/
What do you mean by "rule"? Depending on the exact circumstances, violating terms of service or ignoring robots.txt may not be a violation of criminal law or create any civil liability. In particular, scraping public data is generally legal under the CFAA regardless of robots.txt content.
https://newmedialaw.proskauer.com/2022/05/24/doj-revises-policy-for-cfaa-prosecution-to-reflect-developments-in-web-scraping-and-other-matters/
As a practical matter, if web site owners don't like particular HTTP requests then they can just ignore them or return errors or junk responses.
IANAL and have no affiliations to Plaid. My takeaway from the article and [0] is that Plaid violated privacy laws because they provided insufficient disclosure with respect to the collected data, not that they are selling data to third parties.
Edit: Update [0] to source
[0] https://newmedialaw.proskauer.com/2021/05/11/plaid-federal-electronic-surveillance-claims-dropped-privacy-claims-survive/