Is this me or is it ChatGPT? Today is Halloween! This is my fifteenth(!) year (fifth on this blog) to identify stories to try to “scare” you with tales of eDiscovery, data privacy, cybersecurity and AI horrors because it is, after all, an eDiscovery blog.  Let’s see how I do this year.

Does this scare you?

These revealed redactions also highlighted the company’s deliberate efforts to promote “attractive” users and demote others, creating a carefully curated feed that prioritized beauty standards.

What about this?

There was intent to deprive Signal messages by the plaintiff, “dismissal is the appropriate sanction” and “sanctions against {plaintiff’s counsel} Duffy are appropriate”. Those monetary sanctions turned out to be over $112,000 for plaintiff’s counsel!

Or this?

This company received a €290M GDPR fine for data privacy violations. That’s nothing compared to this company, which agreed to a record $1.4 billion settlement with Texas, over allegations that it had illegally collected facial recognition information on millions of users. Not their first rodeo – they even created sunglasses that can use facial recognition tech to instantly dox people’s identities, phone numbers, and addresses!

How about this?

This guy in Mata v. Avianca gets all the coverage, but this guy had a whopping 22 fake case citations in his filing! Here’s why this will keep happening.

Or maybe this?

There were over a billion data breach victims in a single quarter this year! Even the Wayback Machine isn’t immune!

Have you considered this?

This group says you have a constitutional right to make deepfakes – despite the fact that things like this can happen.

Finally, how about this?

Setting the data locations for the custodian doesn’t do anything to put on hold the files sent to that custodian if they are hyperlinked from the sending custodian’s data location.

Scary, huh?  If the possibility of major redaction mistakes, case dismissal and huge fee awards, huge data privacy fines, AI-generated fake case citations, data breaches or being targeted by a deepfake keeps you up at night, then eDiscovery Today will do its best to provide useful information and best practices to enable you to relax and sleep soundly, even on Halloween!

Speaking of horrors, this one will take you “wayback” – to the future! 😀

What do you think?  Is there a particular eDiscovery issue that scares you?  Please share your comments and let us know if you’d like more information on a particular topic.

Happy Halloween!

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by my employer, my partners or my clients. eDiscovery Today is made available solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Today should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.