"If you take this to its natural extension, the FTC is invalidating hundreds and hundreds of years of statutes being implemented on this topic."

Proposed federal privacy legislation has teeth—and a real shot at passing.

Startups will need to avoid stumbles because "you want to be putting yourself out there as a good, sophisticated and responsible founder," Fenwick & West partner Jonathan Sagot said.

The Justice Department and FTC expect companies to "preserve and produce any and all responsive documents, including data from ephemeral messaging applications designed to hide evidence."

Mass data scraping of personal information can constitute a reportable data breach in many jurisdictions.

"If you're a bad guy and you're not using ChatGPT or other LLMs to go and find vulnerabilities, you're probably not doing your job as a bad guy."