Privacy/security

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Facebook Faces Class Action Lawsuit Over Tracking Cookies

October 6th 2011

A class action lawsuit has been filed against Facebook for the use of tracking cookies that records browsing history after users have logged off the service. Imagine the Winklevoss brothers with a mob of 150 million potential litigants.

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Are You Ready for the US Government as the Arbiter of Trust and Privacy?

April 22nd 2011

Not all nations spy on their people without court orders, but the Washington does. In in my mind, this excludes them from the privacy and trust business. And there are good reasons to be skeptical of Washington’s new approach to national online identity management.

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Nationalism and Your Personal Life: How Privacy Will Reach Its Market Inflection

December 7th 2010

Would you be reluctant participate in a social network that provides backdoor access to a foreign intelligence agency? Consider that the rest of the world already is, and that every government is asking for just such access to services running in their jurisdictions. Nationalism brings a whole new gravitas to personal privacy, and foreign debt.

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Why Is Google Stalking My Friend Anna Bolotovsky? (Litigators,Take Note)

November 29th 2010

Has Google made a privacy slip-up? Imagine finding your real gmail use portrayed on CNN. No matter what terms of use say, isn’t privacy inherent to providing a suitable email service?

Pennsylvania “Blake Robbins” Webcam Privacy Suit Discussed: What Good is Suing A School?

February 23rd 2010

As the case of the Pennsylvania school system that allegedly spied on their students gains broader attention, the Lazy Man and Money blog raises a provocative question…why sue a school? Lawyers and lawsuits are controversial, especially as we debate health care and malpractice reform.  I’d like to hear what you think about this. The more [...]

Surveilling Kids: It’s Still Spying and Full of Trouble

February 19th 2010

According to a class action lawsuit, a Pennsylvania school district used laptops it issued to high school students to regularly spy on them at home via the built-in webcams. In a court filing (Blake J Robbins v Lower Merion School District), the parents of student Blake Robbins are suing the school district for: invasion of [...]

Is Your Search History Private? How PII Data Can Be Built From Anonymous Releases

February 10th 2010

Last year I wrote about Latanya Sweeney, a Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor, who took anonymous data from medical records and used it to identify real patients. She in fact did so on the medical record of the governor who released the data. In the video below, Cory Doctorow (of EFF and boing boing [...]

GPS Surveillance Meets the Fourth Amendment: 2010 Online Law Trend

February 2nd 2010

The parking lot next to my daughter’s daycare warns, “You are under constant video surveillance.”  I don’t think they mean that in the universal sense, but the increasing use of mobile devices, smart cards,  and databases draws the reality of constant surveillance closer. As technologies start to share information, location privacy has the potential to [...]

Digital Marketing Regulation: Google Analyltics May Be Illegal in Germany

November 26th 2009

First They Came for the German Marketers… Continuing my theme that regulation should be a much higher concern to digital marketers and their professional associations, I submit that one core digital marketing tool may already be illegal in the world’s third largest economy. Zeit Online reported today that numerous German privacy officials are convinced that [...]

PII Compliant? 500,000 Veterans’ Social Security Numbers Published in the Congressional Record

November 11th 2009

Just over a year ago, Carl Malamud, the founder of Public.Resource.org, a non-profit dedicated to making public records available online, did the Department of Defense a big proper. He noticed that the social security numbers of officers were being printed in the Congressional Record. Hundreds of thousands of them. Since copies of the Congressional Record [...]