Lipresti Law, P.C.

DEATH OF PRIVACY ALERT ??: Starting on March 28th, EVERYTHING YOU SAY TO YOUR AMAZON ECHO WILL BE SENT TO AMAZON. The company is now eliminating a user privacy feature which had prevented that. You can read the Ars Technica article here: https://lnkd.in/ejzZ5RTg. I remember back in 1999 when Scott McNealy, the former CEO of Sun Microsystems, caught flack for infamously saying: "You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it." And that was about 15 years before the Echo debuted to the public. The descent continues. So much for self-regulation... Amazon wouldn't mishandle all that recorded voice data would they? Never. Oh wait, they already have. ??♂? As noted in the Ars Technica article: "Amazon has previously mismanaged Alexa voice recordings. In 2023, Amazon agreed to?pay $25 million?in civil penalties over the revelation that it stored recordings of children’s interactions with Alexa forever. Adults also didn’t feel properly informed of Amazon’s?inclination toward keeping Alexa recordings?unless prompted not to until 2019—five years after the first Echo came out. If that's not enough to deter you from sharing voice recordings with Amazon, note that the company allowed?employees to listen to Alexa voice recordings.?In 2019, Bloomberg reported that Amazon employees listened to as many as 1,000 audio samples during their nine-hour shifts.... Other reasons why people may be hesitant to trust Amazon with personal voice samples include the previous usage of Alexa voice recordings?in criminal trials..." Data, of course, is the currency of AI, which Amazon has used for decades. And the more data there is, the merrier these companies are and the more easily we can be influenced and manipulated. ???? While this development isn't unexpected when there are so few laws in general regulating commercial privacy, the implications of Amazon's decision are still scary. Alexa, can you list those for me?

** Big News on the Corporate Transparency Act ** The U.S. Treasury Department just announced a major shift in the enforcement of the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA) and its beneficial ownership information (BOI) reporting requirements. --No penalties or fines will be enforced under the existing regulatory deadlines. --No penalties or fines will be imposed on U.S. citizens, domestic reporting companies, or their beneficial owners—even after forthcoming rule changes take effect. --A proposed rulemaking will soon be issued to limit the CTA’s scope to foreign reporting companies only. Stay tuned as more details emerge on the rule changes! Nick Lipresti, Daniel Batterman, Joseph Butler #CorporateTransparencyAct #SmallBusiness #RegulatoryUpdates #BOI #CorporateLaw #TreasuryDepartment