The March ruling by the U.S. District Court for Southern New York against digital lending library Internet Archive “could profoundly affect longstanding protections for reader privacy and thus affect a core purpose of copyright: public access to information,” said an amici brief (docket 23-1260) Wednesday in the 2nd U.S. Circuit Appeals Court from the Center for Democracy & Technology, Library Freedom Project and Public Knowledge in support of the nonprofit Internet Archive.

Sixteen consumer advocacy organizations urged the DOJ to file an antitrust lawsuit against Apple “with haste” in support of the agency’s “antitrust enforcement against Big Tech companies,” said their letter Thursday to Attorney General Merrick Garland, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta and Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter.

The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act allows the states to write and enforce their own kids’ privacy laws, separate and apart from COPPA, so long as those laws aren’t "inconsistent" with the federal statute, said FTC Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya in a 9th U.S. Circuit Appeals Court amicus brief Wednesday (docket 23-2969) in support of California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s(D) appeal to reverse the district court’s injunction that blocks him from enforcing AB-2273, the state’s Age Appropriate Design Code (see 2312140003).

Though the July 24 consolidation of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s social media censorship lawsuit against the Biden administration with Missouri v. Biden doesn’t “deprive” the court of jurisdiction to rule on Kennedy’s motion for a preliminary injunction, adjudication of that motion before the U.S. Supreme Court resolves Missouri “would make little practical difference and would serve only to complicate proceedings,” said DOJ’s brief Wednesday (docket 3:23-cv-00381) in U.S. District Court for Western Louisiana in Monroe.

A second negligence complaint in as many days was filed against Comcast and its Xfinity brand in U.S. District Court for Eastern Pennsylvania in Philadelphia involving a data breach it became aware of Oct. 10. Plaintiff Steven Prescott filed an eight-count class action Tuesday alleging that Xfinity's claims of strong and robust security were “false and misleading” (see 2312200005).

The 5th Circuit’s Oct. 3 decision affirming the injunction barring officials from the White House and four federal agencies from coercing or significantly encouraging social media companies to moderate their content (see 2310040001) “is flawed three times over,” said the government’s opening brief on the merits Tuesday at the U.S. Supreme Court in Murthy v. State of Missouri (docket 23-411). The injunction is stayed pending completion of the SCOTUS review (see 2310230003).

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) and the AGs of 18 other states support the appeal by six Chrome users to reverse the district court’s dismissal of their privacy complaint alleging that Chrome secretly sent users’ personal information to Google (see 2312130029), said the AGs’ amicus brief Monday (docket 22-16993) in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Comcast’s representations of strong and robust security “have proved false and misleading” because it “admittedly failed to safeguard” the sensitive personal identifying information (PII) of millions of its consumers “or implement robust security measures to prevent this information from being stolen,” alleged California resident Steven Prescott’s eight-count class action Tuesday (docket 2:23-cv-05040) in U.S. District Court for Eastern Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

Rite Aid “is pleased to reach an agreement with the FTC and put this matter behind us,” said the retailer Tuesday. It was responding to an FTC settlement, barring it from using facial recognition technology for surveillance purposes for five years, to settle charges it failed to implement “reasonable procedures and prevent harm to consumers” in its use of facial recognition technology to combat theft in “hundreds of stores.”

SiriusXM sells subscriptions “that are easy to purchase" but "extremely difficult to cancel,” with a number of tricks designed to dissuade consumers from carrying through with their cancellations, alleged New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) in a five-count fraud complaint Wednesday in New York County Supreme Court. SiriusXM immediately called James' allegations "baseless."