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Today: Luxembourg court vacates Amazon's $858 million GDPR fine over procedural failures, sending the case back to regulators. The Supreme Court scheduled oral arguments for April on Trump administration efforts to terminate protected status for 350,000 Haitian and several thousand Syrian nationals. Italian data protection authority orders Amazon Italia to immediately limit employee surveillance systems processing health data, union activity, and personal relationship details.
Italian DPA Orders Amazon Italia to Halt Employee Surveillance Platform
Italy's Garante issued urgent measures against Amazon Italia Logistica, ordering immediate limits on processing employee personal data through a management platform and warehouse surveillance cameras. The DPA found managers added detailed comments to employee files, including medical conditions, union involvement, family personal life, and concerns about interpersonal relationships. The controller retained this data for the entire employment relationship and up to 10 years after termination. Surveillance cameras positioned in bathrooms and break areas allowed identification of individuals even with privacy masking enabled. The DPA determined the processing violated Article 88 GDPR (professional aptitude assessment), data minimization (Article 5(1)(c)), storage limitation (Article 5(1)(e)), and lacked valid legal basis under Articles 6 and 9 GDPR. The decision affects approximately 1,800 employees. The controller must verify lawfulness of all free-text field data processing immediately, subject to fines for non-compliance under Article 58(2)(f) GDPR.
D.C. Attorney General Secures $3.29M Title Insurance Kickback Settlement
Four title insurance companies agreed to pay $3.29 million to resolve D.C. Office of the Attorney General claims they violated the Consumer Protection Procedures Act by providing financial incentives to real estate agents for business referrals. Allied Title & Escrow will pay $1.9 million, KVS Title $1 million, Union Settlements $325,000, and Modern Settlements $65,000. The OAG allocated up to $1.75 million for consumer restitution. The settlement provides cash payments of up to $500 for consumers who were referred by real estate agents to the four companies for Washington, D.C. real estate transactions. The practice allegedly prevented consumers from shopping for the best price and service by steering them toward specific title insurance companies. The Superior Court of the District of Columbia approved the settlements on July 31, 2024.
South Korean Police Expose Cryptocurrency Wallet Password, Lose $4.4M
South Korea's National Tax Service inadvertently disclosed the mnemonic recovery phrase of a seized Ledger cryptocurrency wallet in photos released during a press conference announcing law enforcement raids against 124 high-value tax evaders. The images showed a handwritten note containing the wallet recovery phrase, which serves as the master key for restoring assets to another device. Shortly after publication, 4 million Pre-Retogeum (PRTG) tokens worth approximately $4.8 million were transferred out of the confiscated wallet to a new address. The wallet was seized during raids that confiscated 8.1 billion won (approximately $5.6 million) in digital assets. The agency failed to redact sensitive information before releasing images of the Ledger device to the media.
California Appellate Court Exposes AI Hallucination Chain in Dog Custody Case
California's Fourth Appellate District published an opinion emphasizing courts and attorneys must protect the legal system against AI-generated fabricated citations after two attorneys cited non-existent cases in a domestic partnership dissolution involving custody of a dog named Kyra. Attorney Roxanne Chung Bonar cited Marriage of Twigg and Marriage of Teegarden in opposition filings. The actual citations corresponded to completely unrelated cases (one criminal, one spousal support from a different year). The Twigg citation originated from a Reddit blog post authored by "Sassafras Patterdale" describing herself as "a blogger, podcaster, and animal rescuer." Torres's attorney copied the fabricated citation into a draft order, which the trial judge signed. Neither attorney verified the cases existed. The court emphasized that in a system of precedents designed to achieve consistency, predictability, and adherence to the rule of law, the judiciary cannot function unless judges and lawyers confirm the authenticity of cited authorities.
Federal Court Dismisses Wiretap Act Claim Against Healthcare Provider, Rejects Aiding-and-Abetting Liability
U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington dismissed a Wiretap Act claim against PeaceHealth Networks, holding the crime-tort exception did not apply and the statute does not allow secondary liability for procuring interception by third parties. Nichols v. PeaceHealth Networks on Demand LLC, 2026 WL 607763 (W.D. Wash. Mar. 4, 2026). Plaintiff alleged the defendant's website used third-party software to capture personal health information and medical appointment details, sending this information to third parties for targeted advertising in violation of HIPAA. The court held plaintiff failed to plead an unlawful interception because the defendant, as a direct party to the communication, cannot be liable for intercepting it. The crime-tort exception (which applies when a party acquires communications for the purpose of committing a separate wrongdoing) did not apply because plaintiff did not plead facts to support conclusory statements that PeaceHealth "intended to violate" HIPAA. The court also rejected procuring liability, noting the majority of courts have rejected aiding and abetting or procuring theories under the Wiretap Act.
Liberty Mutual and Safeco Reach $6.5M Settlement Over New Mexico UIM Disclosure Failures
Liberty Mutual and Safeco agreed to a $6.5 million class action settlement resolving claims they failed to properly advise New Mexico policyholders that underinsured motorist (UIM) benefits are reduced by amounts received from the at-fault driver's insurer. The settlement benefits policyholders who purchased New Mexico insurance policies with UM/UIM coverage between Oct. 1, 2010, and March 31, 2022, whose benefits were reduced or denied due to a Schmick offset. An offset subclass covers members who submitted UIM claims for motor vehicle accidents during this period whose benefits were offset by amounts paid by the at-fault party's insurer. Plaintiffs alleged the companies violated New Mexico's Unfair Trade Practices Act and breached auto insurance policy contracts by failing to include the disclosure and exclusion required by Crutcher.
ICE Officer Testifies to Daily Arrest Quotas and App-Based Immigration Targeting
Sealed testimony from an ICE officer identified only as "JB" revealed his team received a "verbal order to target eight arrests per day" and relied on an app called Elite to locate individuals with an "immigration nexus." The testimony was delivered last year but transcripts were only recently published by the court. JB explained Elite functions "kind of like Google Maps" and shows how many individuals with an immigration nexus are believed to be in a certain area. Another officer testified that a nexus could mean any history of contact with immigration officials. The government's lawyer objected to the term "quota," but the judge overrode the objection.
KIND Sued Over Alleged Lead in Healthy Grains Dark Chocolate Clusters
Plaintiff Jade Burnett filed a class action lawsuit against KIND LLC in California federal court alleging the company misled consumers by failing to disclose that KIND Healthy Grains Dark Chocolate Clusters contain substantial amounts of lead. Case No. 3:26-cv-00440 (N.D. Cal.). Independent scientific testing commissioned by plaintiff's counsel found the granola clusters contain more than four times the California Proposition 65 Maximum Allowable Dose Level for reproductive toxicity of 0.5 micrograms of lead per day. Burnett claims KIND advertised its granola clusters as being made with "super grains" and "healthy grains" that were "kind for your body" without disclosing lead content. Burnett asserts claims for unfair and unlawful business practices, deceptive advertising, breach of express warranty, unjust enrichment, and violations of California's Consumers Legal Remedies Act. Plaintiff seeks to represent a California class of consumers who purchased the product within the past four years. The lawsuit follows a similar 2025 action against Garden of Life LLC alleging its Organic Plant-Based Protein products contained unsafe levels of lead despite being marketed as safe.
Luxembourg Court Vacates $858M Amazon GDPR Fine on Procedural Grounds
Luxembourg's Administrative Court vacated a 746 million euro ($858 million) fine the National Commission for Data Protection (CNPD) imposed on Amazon in 2021, referring the case back to the regulator. The court overturned the fine because the CNPD failed to determine whether Amazon intentionally violated the GDPR and did not sufficiently consider whether the fine was too high and other measures could have been taken. The fine was the second largest imposed since GDPR took effect in 2018. The CNPD probe launched in 2018 after a French privacy advocacy organization complained about how Amazon obtained consent for targeted ads. Amazon told consumers what data it collected and how it was processed but did not explicitly obtain consent for the processing. The court vacated the fine based on a change in the European Union's Court of Justice laws made after the CNPD's decision, involving a requirement that regulators analyze how they impose financial penalties. The CNPD acknowledged Amazon has fixed the data privacy violations and may issue a new fine after review. The court upheld the CNPD's findings that Amazon's reliance on legitimate interests as the legal basis for processing operations was not justified and information procedures did not comply with GDPR.
EFF Releases Book on Three Decades Fighting Digital Surveillance
The Electronic Frontier Foundation published "Privacy's Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance" by Executive Director Cindy Cohn (MIT Press). The memoir chronicles legal battles over the Crypto Wars (Bernstein v. US Department of Justice), NSA dragnet surveillance (Hepting v. AT&T, Jewel v. NSA), and FBI National Security Letter gag orders. A conversation between Cohn and EFF Special Advisor Cory Doctorow was recorded March 10 at San Francisco's City Lights Bookstore. EFF announced a special podcast series featuring key players and moments from the book.
Major Publishers Block Internet Archive, Risking Historical Web Record
The New York Times and The Guardian began blocking the Internet Archive from crawling their websites using technical measures beyond traditional robots.txt rules, threatening to erase decades of historical news preservation. The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine contains more than one trillion archived web pages relied on daily by journalists, researchers, and courts. Wikipedia alone links to more than 2.6 million news articles preserved at the Archive, spanning 249 languages. Publishers claim the move is driven by concerns about AI companies scraping news content for training models. The Electronic Frontier Foundation argues organizations like the Internet Archive are not building commercial AI systems but preserving historical records. Making material searchable is well-established fair use; courts recognized it when Google copied entire books to create a searchable database. Even if courts place limits on AI training, the law protecting search and web archiving is already well established. If major publishers block the Archive's mission, future researchers may find that huge portions of the historical record have vanished.
Supreme Court Schedules April Arguments on TPS Termination for Haiti and Syria
The Supreme Court announced Monday it will hear oral argument during the second week of April (April 27-29) on whether the Trump administration can end Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for approximately 350,000 Haitian nationals and several thousand Syrian nationals. In a brief, unsigned order, the justices left in place rulings by federal judges in New York and Washington, D.C., that had indefinitely postponed the termination of the program but granted Trump administration requests to weigh in on the merits without waiting for federal appeals courts. Noem v. Doe (Syrian nationals) and Trump v. Miot (Haitian nationals) will be combined and treated as one for purposes of oral argument. A decision is likely to follow by late June or early July. Congress enacted TPS in 1990, giving DHS power to designate a country's citizens as eligible to remain in the U.S. and work if they cannot return due to natural disaster, armed conflict, or other extraordinary and temporary conditions. Janet Napolitano designated Syria under TPS following Bashar al-Assad's brutal crackdown against dissidents. Al-Assad's regime was overthrown in 2024 and he fled to Russia. Then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem announced plans to end Syria's TPS designation effective Nov. 21, 2025, stating Syria's new government was attempting to move the country to stable institutional governance. U.S. District Judge Katherine Polk Failla blocked the government from ending the program for Syria, concluding challengers were likely to succeed on claims the decision violates the Administrative Procedure Act. Failla noted Noem had tried to end TPS for virtually every country up for consideration, which suggested decisions were not appropriate. Napolitano designated Haiti under TPS in 2010 after a 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Port-au-Prince. U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes temporarily blocked the government from ending the program for Haitians on Feb. 2, ruling it was substantially likely Noem ended the designation because of hostility to nonwhite immigrants and violated the APA by not consulting other federal agencies or considering billions Haitian TPS holders contribute to the economy.
Constitutional Law Scholars Debate 14th Amendment Birthright Citizenship
Akhil and Vikram Amar published a response on SCOTUSblog to attorney Pete Patterson's analysis of the 14th Amendment's Citizenship Clause, correcting what they describe as fundamental confusions about U.S. citizenship versus state citizenship. The 14th Amendment states "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside." The Amars explain U.S. citizenship in this sentence is not the same thing as state citizenship. A person can be a U.S. citizen without ever having been a state citizen, such as a child born in Washington, D.C. or a U.S. territory. The residence language of the amendment addresses an entirely different issue: guaranteeing every U.S. citizen a right to relocate over the course of their life and reside as a full and equal state citizen in any state they choose. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 says nothing about state citizenship or state residence but citizenizes a broad swath of native-born Americans, including those born in territories and D.C. The 14th Amendment's purpose was to provide a constitutional foundation at least as broad as the 1866 Act to prevent racist backers of Dred Scott from arguing the statute was unconstitutional. The debate relates to pending litigation in Trump v. Barbara over the Trump administration's effort to deny birthright citizenship to children of undocumented immigrants.
TikTok Deal Includes Unprecedented $10B Fee to Treasury Department
The Trump administration is set to receive $10 billion from investors for facilitating the sale of TikTok to Larry Ellison, private equity firm Silver Lake, and MGX (controlled by the UAE). Backers paid the Treasury Department approximately $2.5 billion when the deal closed in January and are set to make several additional payments until hitting the $10 billion total. The payment would be nearly unprecedented for a government helping arrange a transaction. Investment bankers advising on typical deals receive fees of less than 1 percent of transaction value, with percentages decreasing as deal size increases. Vice President JD Vance previously said the new TikTok entity running U.S. operations is valued at about $14 billion in the deal, which some tech analysts say dramatically undervalues the company. Administration officials stated the fee is justified given Trump's role in saving TikTok in the U.S. and navigating negotiations with China. China maintains a significant ownership stake in the restructured entity. The deal did not address the purported national security, privacy, or propaganda concerns that motivated the forced sale.
Workplace surveillance: Audit workforce management platforms for special category data collection in free-text fields. Implement technical controls preventing managers from documenting employee health information, union activity, or family details. Review camera positioning to ensure compliance with data minimization and workplace monitoring regulations. Italian DPA enforcement against Amazon Italia demonstrates regulators will issue urgent measures affecting thousands of employees when surveillance systems process sensitive personal data without valid legal basis.
AI citation verification: Implement mandatory citation verification procedures requiring attorneys to pull and read cases before citing them in pleadings. California appellate court published opinion emphasizing courts and attorneys have a responsibility to protect the legal system against AI-generated fabricated citations. Do not rely on secondary sources, blog posts, or AI tools for legal citations without independent verification. Consider requiring Shepardizing or KeyCite for all citations to detect non-existent cases.
GDPR penalty defense: Organizations defending GDPR enforcement actions should challenge both substantive findings and procedural compliance with EU Court of Justice penalty assessment requirements established after 2021. Luxembourg court vacated Amazon's $858 million fine for failure to conduct intentionality analysis and proportionality assessment. Document all remediation efforts to demonstrate violations have been corrected, which may influence penalty recalculation on remand.
TPS employer planning: Employers of Temporary Protected Status holders from Haiti (approximately 350,000) and Syria (several thousand) should prepare for Supreme Court decision expected by early July. The program remains in place pending the ruling. Review work authorization documents for expiration dates and develop contingency staffing plans. Lower court rulings found Trump administration likely violated Administrative Procedure Act by failing to consult other agencies and consider economic contributions of TPS holders.
Cryptocurrency evidence handling: Law enforcement agencies must implement procedures to redact recovery phrases, private keys, and wallet addresses before releasing case materials to the public or media. Store cryptocurrency recovery credentials in secure evidence management systems, not handwritten notes. South Korea's National Tax Service lost $4.4 million after inadvertently disclosing a seized wallet's mnemonic recovery phrase in press conference photos.