The Insights Association helped Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Tennessee approve changes this year harmonizing their treatment of independent contractors, including respondents who receive incentives for their participation in research studies.
In hiQ Labs, Inc. v. LinkedIn Corporation, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued an especially notable decision with respect to the scraping of publicly-available data from the Internet for data analytics. While upholding a preliminary injunction prohibiting LinkedIn from cutting off access to hiQ, the court also held that hiQ’s scraping of such data did not constitute a violation of the federal Computer Fraud & Abuse Act (CFAA). This decision doesn’t completely clear the way for scraping of data from websites without the authorization of the website owner, but it is certainly helpful precedent for data analytics providers.
The marketing research and data analytics industry already has a helpful example of the costs of an overly broad data privacy law in the money spent attempting to comply with Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). A new study tries to quantify the cost of a comprehensive U.S. privacy law modeled on GDPR and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), the new law coming into effect in the Golden State on January 1, 2020.