In Gates v. Eagle Family Foods in the Northern District of Illinois, Gregory Gates, a former sanitation and assembly line employee, alleges that Eagle Foods collected and retained his handprints without consent as part of his timekeeping requirements while he worked at the Waukegan facility in 2016 and 2018. Eagle Family Foods (Eagle Foods) says the Illinois Biometric Privacy Act (BIPA) does not apply to Gates’s claims of improper handprint collection because he is a…

Calling all Thin Mints fans! Girl Scout Thin Mints cookies can now be delivered right to your doorstep – by drone… IF you live in Christiansburg, Virginia. The town has been a testing arena for commercial drone delivery by Wing (a subsidiary of Alphabet, Google’s parent company). Before Girl Scout Thin Mints, starting in 2019, drugstore products, FedEx packages, local pastries, tacos, and cold brew coffees have been delivered by drone to residents of this…

This week, Kroger and Drone Express announced a pilot program offering grocery delivery by autonomous drones. Jody Kalmbach, Vice President of Product Experience, said, “Kroger’s new drone delivery pilot is part of the evolution of our rapidly growing and innovative e-commerce business which includes pickup, delivery, and ship and reached more than $10 billion in sales in 2020. The pilot reinforces the importance of flexibility and immediacy to customers, powered by modern, cost-effective, and efficient…

If you are on top of updating your iPhone patches when a new operating system is released by Apple, you probably updated your iOS to version 14.5 when Apple released it last week. However, even if you did update last week, it is important to update again this week to iOS 14.5.1, which Apple released on Monday. If you didn’t upload 14.5 last week, that’s even more reason to update to 14.5.1 now. iOS 14.5.1…

Eversource Energy, which is the largest energy supplier in New England with 4.3 million customers in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire, is notifying customers that their personal information was compromised on an unsecured cloud server. The personal information that was compromised includes names, addresses, telephone numbers, Social Security numbers, services addresses, and account numbers. The notification letter states that on March 16, 2021, Eversource discovered that the “[c]ompany cloud storage site had been misconfigured so…

The Associated Press has reported that the Metropolitan Washington, D.C. police department has been the victim of a hacking incident for which the Russian-based ransomware group Babuk is claiming responsibility. According to the department, the FBI is investigating the incident. It is reported that the department’s police operations were not affected. Babuk claims that it stole sensitive data from the department. Some of the department’s data were being leaked on the internet this week, including…

This week Adobe Inc. released some updated software for companies to target customers with advertising and offers using the brands’ own data as opposed to third-party cookies. More and more, third-party cookies are being eliminated from websites due to consumer concerns regarding unwanted tracking across the internet. Many web browsers already block third-party cookies, and soon even Google Chrome will block them. The new Adobe platform, Real-time Customer Data, will let its customers ask consumers…