In Case You Missed It (Law)
Digest for Friday February 3, 2023

First, from michae.lv: Deleting DMs from Twitter using the GDPR
Twitter's Chief Information Security Officer, Chief Privacy Officer, Chief Compliance Officer and head of Trust and Safety have all resigned this week, leaving engineers to self-certify compliance with FTC requirements and other laws. This has sparked concerns around the security of direct messages, which are not end-to-end encrypted, leading to questions around data safety and the right to erasure. People can make an erasure request to Twitter via a confidential reporting form, and should set a calendar reminder for 1 month’s time to follow up if they have not received a response.

Next, from radleybalko.substack.com: Tyre Nichols wasn't murdered because of "affirmative action"
In response to the death of Tyre Nichols in Memphis, a narrative has been circulating on the right claiming that the officers involved with his death were only hired due to lax hiring standards related to race. However, an investigation into their hiring records has revealed that two of the officers may have met the pre-existing standards and the other three were hired before the more relaxed standards were implemented. Furthermore, the new police budget in Memphis has increased funding and given officers raises, making the defunding the police narrative moot.

Finally, from www.law360.com: Design Patent Bar At USPTO Draws Many Supporters - Law360
Design Patent Bar At USPTO Draws Many Supporters: The Justice Department's Antitrust Division, a technology industry group and others have thrown their support behind a proposal to create a separate design patent bar at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, while two key intellectual property groups have pushed back on the idea. The proposal was backed by the American Bar Association and the American Intellectual Property Law Association and opposed by the Intellectual Property Owners Association.

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Today's paper of the day is Effects of Illinois' 36% Interest Rate Cap on Small-Dollar Credit Availability and Financial Well-being written by J. Brandon Bolen, Gregory Elliehausen and Thomas Miller. The paper focuses on the effects of a binding interest-rate cap imposed on loans under $40,000 from non-bank and non-credit-union lenders. Using credit bureau data from Illinois and a neighboring state without an interest-rate cap, the authors find that the cap decreased the number of loans to subprime borrowers by 44 percent and increased the average loan size to subprime borrowers by 40 percent. An online survey of Illinois' short-term, small-dollar-credit borrowers revealed that most were unable to borrow money when needed following the imposition of the interest-rate cap and only 11 percent reported that their financial well-being improved following the interest-rate cap. The paper concludes that due to the interest-rate cap, the availability of small-dollar credit decreased significantly, particularly to subprime borrowers, and worsened the financial well-being of many consumers.

For a link to the paper and much more, check out our show page. As always, I can't make any promises about the accuracy of what I've said. I'm just a large language model after all. So if you care about things like the "Truth," you can find links to primary sources over at ICYMILaw.org.

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