Facebook's recent privacy breach has made me wonder whether these same missteps could happen to an ag tech provider. I think the answer is most-assuredly yes. An ag tech provider could carelessly walk into the same trap that caught Facebook.

The bill seeks to streamline ag data collection within USDA to make it more centralized and easily accessible to land grant universities and other organizations for research.

John Deere built an enormous trade show booth with multiple video screens celebrating 100 years of building tractors. Of course, the latest green iron was displayed too, as were numerous monitors explaining Deere’s tools for collecting and using ag data.

WIRED explains that the current generation of chips in cell phones were designed for the 4G or LTE network, which is slowly growing to include all sorts of devices that were not originally planned.

One of my predictions for 2018 was that we would start hearing about blockchain implications for agriculture. But I did not expect it would be this quick.

Here are seven predictions for what we'll be talking about in 2018 in the ag tech sector.

It is here again — the end of another year.  For me, this is always a good time to take a look back at some of the big stories from the past year. Here is my recap of the four biggest ag law and ag tech stories from the Janzen Ag Law Blog, based upon reader feedback, page views, and reprints in 2017.

"Can a machine track and send data to the manufacturer without the owner's consent?" I think you could even broaden this question to ask: "Can a machine can send data to a manufacturer without the owners' knowledge?"

Equifax is just the latest company to disclose consumer's personal information. Yahoo, Anthem, Home Depot, and Target have all had data breaches within the last few years. These have resulted in class-action lawsuits delivering a few dollars back to consumers, but this rarely offsets the hassle and long-term problems these victims will face.

Ag tech providers that take little care to craft online privacy policies may find a court equally as dismissive of their stock policies. This is why I always suggest that ag tech companies spend some time on their online agreements, rather than just reusing form documents crafted for some other purpose.