In what may be the first state enforcement action under a comprehensive privacy law, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) sued Allstate for the alleged unlawful collection, use and sale of the location data from Texans’ cellphones through software secretly embedded into mobile apps like Life360. Allstate and its subsidiary data analytics company Arity used the data to raise insurance rates, Paxton alleged at the Texas District Court of Montgomery County.

Privacy protections might be sidelined during the Trump administration in order to focus on other emerging technology, said Mallory Knodel, founder of the Social Web Foundation, in a Friday piece for TechPolicy.Press.

The Commerce Department failed to justify its finding that a subsidy to exporter OCP from a program for relief from tax fines and penalties was de facto specific, the Court of International Trade held on Jan. 8. Remanding the countervailing duty investigation on phosphate fertilizers from Morocco for a second time, Judge Timothy Stanceu said the agency's altered defense of its specificity finding was no less "absurd" than it was in the first go-round.

The FCC in a U.S. Supreme Court filing defended the USF in general, and the contribution factor more specifically, as the justices prepared to hear what could be the most consequential FCC case in years (see 2412100060). SCOTUS agreed in November to review the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals' 9-7 en banc decision, which sided with Consumers' Research and found that the USF contribution factor is a "misbegotten tax.”

Importer Retractable Technologies on Jan. 7 dropped its lawsuit at the Court of International Trade against the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative's 100% Section 301 duty hike on needles and syringes. The company voluntarily dismissed the action without prejudice and declined to comment on the decision (Retractable Technologies v. United States, CIT # 24-00185).

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on Jan. 8 heard oral argument in the massive Section 301 litigation, primarily probing the litigants' positions regarding how to interpret the term "modify" in the statute and whether the statute allows the U.S. trade representative to impose duties in response to retaliatory measures from China (HMTX Industries v. United States, Fed. Cir. # 23-1891).

The Fish and Wildlife Service is affirming as final a 2016 interim rule that would essentially ban the import of all species of salamanders because of a lethal fungus that the salamanders can carry and spread among the salamander population, it said in a Federal Register notice.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on Jan. 8 heard oral argument in the massive Section 301 litigation, primarily probing the litigants' positions regarding how to interpret the term "modify" in the statute and whether the statute allows the U.S. trade representative to impose duties in response to retaliatory measures from China (HMTX Industries v. United States, Fed. Cir. # 23-1891).

Another plaintiff group in a large, branching Vietnamese plywood circumvention investigation case raised exporter-specific arguments Jan. 2 against the Commerce Department’s adverse facts available-based circumvention finding for 20 exporters (Shelter Forest International Acquisition v. United States, CIT Consol. # 23-00144).

The following are short summaries of recent CBP NY rulings issued by the agency's National Commodity Specialist Division in New York: