Internet Experts Creating a Community of Compliance with Practical Solutions

Governor Tim Walz signed the Minnesota Consumer Data Privacy Act (“MNCDPA”) into law on May 24, 2024. The MNCDPA will come into effect on July 31, 2025. The good news is that the bill does not authorize Attorney General rulemaking authority. To determine if you are a qualified business under the MNCDPA, you must conduct business in Minnesota or produce products or services that target Minnesota residents and satisfy one or more of the following thresholds:

The Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) routinely evaluates the privacy representations a company makes against their data handling practices. When discrepancies arise between claim and reality, incorrect assertions about data identification are often to blame. Data is anonymous only when it can never be associated back to a person. If data can be used to uniquely identify or target a user, it is Personally Identifiable Information (“PII”) and handled accordingly. Hashing, only obscures personal data. It involves taking a piece of data—like an email address, a phone number, or a user ID and turn it into a number (a hash) in a consistent way: the same input data will always create the same hash. For example, hashing the fictional email spam@gmail.com transforms it into the hash “2813448ce6316cb70b38fa29c8c64130”, a hexadecimal number that might appear random, but is always what someone gets when they hash that email.

“The freedom to change jobs is core to economic liberty and to a competitive, thriving economy,” said Chair Lina M. Khan. “Noncompetes block workers from freely switching jobs, depriving them of higher wages and better working conditions, and depriving businesses of a talent pool that they need to build and expand. By ending this practice, the FTC’s proposed rule would promote greater dynamism, innovation, and healthy competition.” Under the guise of increasing workers’ earning, the Federal Trade Commission proposed a new rule that would ban employers from imposing noncompete clauses on their workers – irrespective of their position in the company and their access to Company confidential and proprietary information. The proposed rule would also apply to independent contractors and anyone who works for an employer, whether paid or unpaid. It would also require employers to rescind existing noncompetes and actively inform workers that they are no longer in effect.