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Facial Recognition Technology in the Market: What Consumers Need to Know to Protect Their Rights
Get PDFFacial recognition technology (FRT) has rapidly expanded in consumer products over the last decade, offering convenience, but raising significant privacy concerns. This article examines the implications of FRT on consumer privacy, emphasizing the unique risks associated with biometric data. Unlike other personal data, biometrics are biologically unique and irreplaceable, making unauthorized access and misuse particularly harmful. Despite the growing consumer awareness and concern about data privacy, current legal protections are fragmented and insufficient. This article provides a comprehensive analysis of how FRT is integrated into products and services and highlights the privacy risks associated with each. It reviews existing federal and state privacy laws and discusses their limitations and enforcement mechanisms. The article also explores liability issues, detailing the avenues for public enforcement by state attorneys general and the Federal Trade Commission, as well as private rights of action available under certain state laws. This article argues for the necessity of a uniform legal framework that includes a private right of action for consumers to seek compensation for damages resulting from privacy violations. By proposing a balanced approach that combines regulatory oversight with consumer empowerment, this article aims to enhance the protection of consumer privacy rights in the age of FRT, ensuring that both businesses and consumers can navigate this landscape with greater confidence and security
Truth in Advertising for Environmental Sustainability
Get PDF“Sustainability” is in—but what does that term mean, when applied to products, services or brands? This article explores existing Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) oversight of “sustainable” claims in marketing, centering on the FTC’s Guidelines for the Use of Environmental Marketing Claims (often referred to as the “Green Guides”). It analyzes thousands of public comments filed in a recent FTC quasi-rulemaking docket to inform proposed revisions to the Green Guides. The article suggests that the FTC include guidance on “sustainable” claims in its next revision to the Green Guides, and further recommends that the FTC formally extend the Green Guides to include claims made about brands and brand operations in response to growing use of “sustainable” claims in brand-level advertisements. This increased oversight of “sustainable” claims will instill confidence in consumers about the sustainable products they buy, help marketers make genuine “sustainable” claims, and foster competition and innovation in businesses to meet the demand for sustainable products
Internet Drug Prohibition and the Opioid Overdose Crisis
No full textThe Ryan Haight Online Pharmacy Consumer Protection Act (Ryan Haight Act) prohibits controlled substance tele-prescribing when it occurs without a preliminary in-person medical evaluation. This Article details the Ryan Haight Act’s consequences for the practice of telemedicine in general and opioid addiction treatment in particular. In doing so, it builds on literature exploring the tension between the federal criminal regulation of controlled substance prescribing and the management of large-scale public health crises, particularly the opioid overdose crisis.
By restricting the tele-prescription of certain controlled substances used for opioid addiction treatment, the Ryan Haight Act limits access to care for a highly vulnerable patient population that surpasses six million people nationwide. This issue has persisted despite telemedicine proving to be as effective as in-person health care for this form of treatment.
Furthermore, U.S. telemedicine governance has evolved since the passage of the Ryan Haight Act, with several states adopting their own restrictions on controlled substance tele-prescribing. Using Medicare claims data and a dataset of state telemedicine policies, and leveraging the federal enforcement waiver of the in-person medical evaluation rule during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, this Article investigates state policymaking behavior and its health service implications. Forty-two states and the District of Columbia affirmatively liberalized controlled substance tele-prescribing during the COVID-19 pandemic, while eight states imposed their own in-person medical evaluation requirements. Patients in states with restrictions were twenty-two percent less likely to start opioid addiction treatment via telemedicine than patients in states without restrictions. Conceptually, these findings illuminate the contours and porosity of states’ autonomy in the regulation of medicine. Practically, these findings reveal that changes in federal controlled substance policy will be insufficient to maximize treatment access if they fail to account for state tele-prescribing restrictions.
Against this backdrop, this Article offers a blueprint for controlled substance law that seeks to improve access to opioid addiction treatment, and that accounts for the variation in postures that the federal and state governments have adopted toward controlled substance teleprescribing. It proposes legislative, regulatory, and judicial remedies that share a common purpose: shielding clinicians from law enforcement actions when tele-prescribing opioid addiction medications