The Department of Justice has filed an antitrust case against Google in federal court, alleging violations of anti-monopoly laws in the search and advertising markets. EPIC has long warned regulators about the harmful privacy consequences of market consolidation by Google and other technology firms. More than a decade ago, EPIC urged the FTC to block Google’s proposed acquisition of DoubleClick. EPIC said that the acquisition would enable Google to collect the personal information of billions of users and track their browsing activities across the web. EPIC correctly warned that this acquisition would accelerate Google’s dominance of the online advertising industry and diminish competition. The FTC ultimately allowed the merger to go forward. EPIC has since repeatedly warned the FTC that other mergers posed similar risks to consumer privacy and competition. In 2011, EPIC warned the FTC that Google’s dominance in the internet search marketplace was allowing it to preference its own content in search results. Today Google occupies 92% of the search market worldwide.
EPIC has filed an amicus brief in the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court urging the court to reject the decades-old third-party doctrine, which allows the government to access electronic data collected by third parties without a warrant. In Commonwealth v. Zachery, the court will decide whether an individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in the data collected by transit authorities through their public transportation card. EPIC notes that individuals today are "largely unaware of the volume and sensitivity of data collected about them" by digital services that have become necessary in today's world. Although people may recognize that third parties collect their data to an extent, "they expect their data to be used only for the limited purposes associated with that service." EPIC argues that the third-party doctrine is a relic of the past that is at odds with modern technologies and urges the court to replace the doctrine with an approach based on modern privacy law principles. EPIC has previously argued against the continued use of the third-party doctrine in constitutional privacy analysis.
A federal court ordered the Department of Justice today to determine President Trump's position on releasing the complete, unredacted Mueller Report. The President recently tweeted that he has "fully authorized the total Declassification of any & all documents" pertaining to the Russia investigation with "[n]o redactions!" During a hearing this morning in EPIC's and BuzzFeed's joint cases for disclosure of the complete Mueller Report, Judge Reggie B. Walton rejected the DOJ's claim that the White House did not actually intend to declassify any information via the President's tweets. "It's not the White House that declassifies information, it's the President," Walton said. Judge Walton ordered the DOJ to provide a sworn statement by Tuesday from someone "who has conferred directly with the President" as to whether the entire Mueller Report should be released. Walton has already ordered the DOJ to provide EPIC with extensive new material from the Report by November 2, in addition to the material previously disclosed as a result of EPIC's case. EPIC's Freedom of Information Act suit—the first in the nation for the disclosure of the Mueller Report—is EPIC v. DOJ, No. 19-810.
