Breaches, location data, surveillance, and who holds what about you.
Minnesota's civil claim for a fake sexual image carries a statutory penalty ten times the one for a real image — and drops an element. Four statutes, two clocks, one federal lever.
Read →Minn. Stat. §§ 325E.311–.316 — the state no-call registry and its caller-ID provision — expired December 31, 2012. What survives, what replaced it, and where the private remedy is.
Read →The MCDPA is codified at Minn. Stat. §§ 325M.10–.21, not in a chapter of its own. Its 21 exclusions are where the surprises live: the small-business exemption carries a carve-back with no size threshold, and there is no general exemption for nonprofits.
Read →Under 20 U.S.C. § 1232g(d), FERPA rights pass to the student at 18 or on attending a postsecondary institution — whichever comes first. Minn. Stat. § 13.32 then supplies nineteen clauses of permitted disclosure, a parent veto over juvenile justice requests, and a ban on monitoring school-issued devices.
Read →Minn. Stat. § 181.974 has no employer-size threshold, no agency to exhaust, and a treble-damages private action. It also protects less information than GINA does, and it has no exceptions at all.
Read →Minnesota recognized no common-law privacy tort until 1998. Lake v. Wal-Mart adopted three branches and refused a fourth — and it decided nothing about the elements, which later cases have mostly narrowed.
Read →Minn. Stat. § 13.43 makes eight categories of government personnel data public, voids confidentiality terms in public-employment settlements, and applies that rule to court orders too.
Read →Minn. Stat. § 325E.59 imposes seven prohibitions on a private business's use of Social Security numbers plus an affirmative access-control duty — and contains no penalty, damages, or enforcement subdivision at all. The remedy question has to be answered from outside the section.
Read →Chapter 13 gives the subject of government data four separate rights: the Tennessen warning, a ten-business-day access clock, a 30-day correction procedure, and § 13.08 damages. The use limit in § 13.05, subd. 4 is the one with teeth.
Read →Minnesota Statutes use the word 'biometric' in 17 sections, and none of them is an Illinois-style BIPA. What actually reaches a fingerprint, faceprint, or voiceprint in Minnesota is chapter 13, one honesty-testing statute, and a school fingerprint-card rule.
Read →Sections 325M.30–.34 compel a platform to publish statistics about itself and give no one a private cause of action. Section 325M.40, added by Laws 2026, ch. 111, creates a $10,000 statutory-damages claim for a child or parent — effective July 1, 2027.
Read →In Chatrie v. United States, a divided Supreme Court held that pulling a person's location data from Google is a search. Minnesota's Legislature required a warrant for exactly that in 2014 — before Carpenter, and long before this term.
Read →Minn. Stat. § 325E.61, chapter 325M, and chapter 13 use three different definitions, three different triggers, and three different enforcers — and § 13.05, subd. 11 pulls private contractors into the Data Practices Act whether or not the contract says so.
Read →Minnesota's Data Practices Act gives a data subject a ten-business-day response deadline, a written-denial requirement that must cite a statute, and two enforcement tracks. Most people use none of it.
Read →Minn. Stat. § 13.825 classifies body-worn camera data as private or nonpublic and then carves out five exceptions. The retention floor is 90 days — which is the number that decides most cases.
Read →In FCC v. AT&T, the Court upheld the FCC's power to impose forfeiture penalties without a jury. Minnesota's own Consumer Data Privacy Act took effect July 31, 2025 — with real rights, and enforcement reserved exclusively to the Attorney General.
Read →Minn. Stat. § 325E.61 requires notice 'in the most expedient time possible and without unreasonable delay,' plus notice to the national credit bureaus within 48 hours when more than 500 people are notified at one time. Enforcement is the Attorney General's alone — and GLBA financial institutions are exempt outright.
Read →In Cox v. Sony Music, the Court erased a $1 billion verdict and held that an ISP is not liable merely for serving subscribers it knows are infringing. The last time the music industry could not reach the middleman, it sued a mother of four from Brainerd.
Read →Minn. Stat. § 626A.02, subd. 2(d) lets a party to a conversation record it, and § 626A.13 gives the person recorded a civil action worth at least $10,000 when it does not. Section 609.746 governs cameras, contains no one-party rule, and creates no civil remedy at all.
Read →The Minnesota Health Records Act, Minn. Stat. §§ 144.291–144.298, requires signed consent for releases that HIPAA permits outright. Section 144.292 sets a 30-day access deadline and a capped fee schedule; § 144.298 gives the patient a private action against the requester as well as the releaser.
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