Privacy and Security Law Blog : Privacy & Security Law Blog : Davis Wright Tremaine LLP : Seattle, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., New York, San Francisco, Shanghai, Portland and Anchorage Law Firm

Posted by Peter Mucklestone

The Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) recently released an updated 2007 version of the Bank Secrecy Act/Anti-Money Laundering (BSA/AML) Examination Manual, which updates and further clarifies supervisory expectations since the 2006 version was published last year. The Manual is used in connection with examinations of supervised financial institutions.

The revised version is based on feedback from the banking industry and examination staff. The Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) collaborated on the revisions made to the section that addresses compliance with economic and trade sanctions administered and enforced by OFAC.

The 2007 version of the manual is located on the FFIEC BSA/AML InfoBase website.

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Posted by Randy Gainer

InDouglas v. United States District Court, No. 06-75424, 2007 WL 2069542, at *1-2 (9th Cir. July 18, 2007), the Court held that the terms of a revised online contract were ineffective when a user was not notified of changes when they were made.The Court statedthat the trials court’s decision finding the contract changes were effective “reflects fundamental misapplications of contract law and goes to the heart of petitioner’s claim. . . .” Id.

Although some observers seemed to believe the Douglas decision established new law, it applied long-settled principles, as others recognized. Principles regarding how online agreements may be amended are summarized in Raymond P. Nimmer & Holly K. Towle, Amending or Modifying the Terms, ¶ 8.10[7] The Law of Electronic Commercial Transactions (2007). Among those principles is that, under the common law of contracts, which generally governs service contracts, there must be an offer, acceptance, and consideration to amend a contract. Id. at *1-2. Douglas simply applied the offer and acceptance rule: a party cannot offer an amendment nor the other party accept the amendment without the offeror providing notice of the change. 

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Posted by Ronnie London and Sarah Duran

The United States District Court for the Western District of Washington(state) has issued a decision in Zango, Inc. v. Kaspersky Lab, Inc. dismissing Zango’s claim relating to Kaspersky’s distribution of computer anti-virus/anti-malware software that, among other things, targeted Zango’s products as objectionable.^* Taking a fairly broad view of “safe harbor” immunity built into the Communications Decency Act (CDA) – specifically, in Section 230(c)(2) of the U.S. Code title dedicated to Communications Law – the court rejected Zango’s claims that Kaspersky’s anti-virus software improperly identified Zango’s websites and ads as malware and thus constituted tortious interference with contract and business expectancy, and trade libel, and a violation of Washington state’s Consumer Protection Act. The case is significant because it suggests anti-malware vendors and distributors are entitled to absolute immunity to communicate with their customers about potential malware risks and facilitate their customers’ decisions about other companies’ software, without incurring liability to those companies.

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Posted by Thomas Jeffry

The clash between privacy advocates and those companies who make millions of dollars collecting and selling data about pharmaceutical prescription patterns was perhaps inevitable. When the State of New Hampshire passed the Prescription Confidentiality Act last year, leading health information brokers were quick to challenge the law which prohibited prescription information records which contain identifiable data about a patient or prescriber from being transferred, licensed, sold, or used for most commercial purposes. The Act specifically precluded the use of prescriber-identifiable data for "physician detailing" used by pharmaceutical companies to track the prescribing-habits of physicians in order to target individual sales pitches to such physicians.

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