Sunday, 12 April 2015, SAN FRANCISCO - In the face of longtime U.S. government lassitude in enforcing privacy, anti-trust and other laws against giant technology firms such as Facebook, Google, Amazon and a host of others big and smaller doubtless largely because of the documented complicity of most if not all giant tech firms in contributing data to continuing blatantly unconstitutional U.S. government domestic mass surveillance and data collection operations even as European regulators have pounded these tech behemoths with privacy and other violation rulings and huge fines to which big tech seems all but impervious, there is one most unlikely lawyer Jay Edelson, 43, and his most unconventional law firm Edelson PC (whose 20 lawyers reportedly wear hoodies sporting the firm's logo to work) which has been taking a leading role in class-action attacks using mostly older laws against these technology monsters based on their invasions of Americans' privacy and has earned Mr. Edelson the New York Times tribute (or condemnation depending on one's point of view) of being "if not the most hated person in Silicon Valley, very close to it" as well as earning Edelson PC an estimated $1 billion in recoveries from these companies for alleged privacy violations.
The class-action lawsuit brought most recently by Edelson against Facebook for its allegedly "private" data collection from use of widespread facial recognition biometric technology which as reported here in an earlier Ninth Amendment post immediately had European regulators up in arms long ago yet met with a resounding silence in the U.S. is but one in a very long series of Edelson class-action lawsuits against a virtual who's-who of tech companies which also recently saw the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit rule that the named plaintiff had standing in another Edelson lawsuit claiming misinformation about him was sold by Spokeo a search engine that purports to sell all the (presumably correct) information it can gather on a person to whomever wishes to pay for it. Spokeo is appealing that ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court with plenty of friendly firepower provided by lawyers for other big tech companies in the form of amici curiae (friends of the Court) briefs. Mr. Edelson noted that since the revelations of contractor Edward J. Snowden of massively unconstitutional privacy breaches by the National Security Agency (N.S.A.) that courts have been much more willing to allow cases to go forward for widespread abuses and violations of Americans' privacy rights. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) reportedly finally also has picked up the pace of initiating some actions. (The unofficial U.S. government regulatory motto being: "We're slow, but we're here.")
Meanwhile Facebook unsurprisingly vigorously denies the charges filed against it claiming that Facebook users could turn off facial recognition biometric technology (if only they knew where to look in the notoriously confusing ever "evolving" user privacy controls of that Zuckerboy enterprise). This in fact also points to a bigger issue which may be facing Edelson in the future being that merely by clicking on a box users of many computer applications allegedly now are agreeing to the extremely lengthy "terms and conditions" which increasingly somewhere buried in them contain mandatory arbitration clauses as the days seem long gone when courts actually ruled in such cases for example against insurance companies that used such (once) obviously deceptive devices as "adhesion contracts" which virtually no one read and if they did found them essentially impossible to understand and digest much less being able to have them changed in any case if they did. Nevertheless Edelson PC reportedly took on one such matter with an arbitration clause against AT&T by filing dozens of arbitration cases just to "send a message" to other tech giants (although AT&T reportedly still does have the arbitration clause in its contracts which the Ninth Amendment thankfully has not had occasion to review).
Whatever the case Mr. Edelson and his firm would seem to be undaunted based on his interview in San Francisco in the article linked to below as well as in viewing the photographs therein showing lawyers and/or staff from Edelson PC back in Chicago engaged in a seemingly casual untroubled game on a ping-pong table which apparently occupies one corner office of the most colorfully decorated firm of the "Billion Dollar Man" who some believe a chamption of privacy rights and others just another class-action scoundrel. In full disclosure Mr. Edelson is a graduate of the University of Michigan Law School which also was attended by a member of the Ninth Amendment's editorial board albeit in a different time period with no compensation sought nor provided for the publication of this post. Readers interested in more information concerning the above including some of the more obscure statutes relied on in lawsuits brought by Edelson PC can go to the link below.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/technology/unpopular-in-silicon-valley.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0
Copyright 2015 Martin P. All World Rights Expressly Reserved
The class-action lawsuit brought most recently by Edelson against Facebook for its allegedly "private" data collection from use of widespread facial recognition biometric technology which as reported here in an earlier Ninth Amendment post immediately had European regulators up in arms long ago yet met with a resounding silence in the U.S. is but one in a very long series of Edelson class-action lawsuits against a virtual who's-who of tech companies which also recently saw the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit rule that the named plaintiff had standing in another Edelson lawsuit claiming misinformation about him was sold by Spokeo a search engine that purports to sell all the (presumably correct) information it can gather on a person to whomever wishes to pay for it. Spokeo is appealing that ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court with plenty of friendly firepower provided by lawyers for other big tech companies in the form of amici curiae (friends of the Court) briefs. Mr. Edelson noted that since the revelations of contractor Edward J. Snowden of massively unconstitutional privacy breaches by the National Security Agency (N.S.A.) that courts have been much more willing to allow cases to go forward for widespread abuses and violations of Americans' privacy rights. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) reportedly finally also has picked up the pace of initiating some actions. (The unofficial U.S. government regulatory motto being: "We're slow, but we're here.")
Meanwhile Facebook unsurprisingly vigorously denies the charges filed against it claiming that Facebook users could turn off facial recognition biometric technology (if only they knew where to look in the notoriously confusing ever "evolving" user privacy controls of that Zuckerboy enterprise). This in fact also points to a bigger issue which may be facing Edelson in the future being that merely by clicking on a box users of many computer applications allegedly now are agreeing to the extremely lengthy "terms and conditions" which increasingly somewhere buried in them contain mandatory arbitration clauses as the days seem long gone when courts actually ruled in such cases for example against insurance companies that used such (once) obviously deceptive devices as "adhesion contracts" which virtually no one read and if they did found them essentially impossible to understand and digest much less being able to have them changed in any case if they did. Nevertheless Edelson PC reportedly took on one such matter with an arbitration clause against AT&T by filing dozens of arbitration cases just to "send a message" to other tech giants (although AT&T reportedly still does have the arbitration clause in its contracts which the Ninth Amendment thankfully has not had occasion to review).
Whatever the case Mr. Edelson and his firm would seem to be undaunted based on his interview in San Francisco in the article linked to below as well as in viewing the photographs therein showing lawyers and/or staff from Edelson PC back in Chicago engaged in a seemingly casual untroubled game on a ping-pong table which apparently occupies one corner office of the most colorfully decorated firm of the "Billion Dollar Man" who some believe a chamption of privacy rights and others just another class-action scoundrel. In full disclosure Mr. Edelson is a graduate of the University of Michigan Law School which also was attended by a member of the Ninth Amendment's editorial board albeit in a different time period with no compensation sought nor provided for the publication of this post. Readers interested in more information concerning the above including some of the more obscure statutes relied on in lawsuits brought by Edelson PC can go to the link below.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/technology/unpopular-in-silicon-valley.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0
Copyright 2015 Martin P. All World Rights Expressly Reserved
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