RT @charlesornstein: Bet you've never seen a #HIPAA violation quite like this one. #privacy #hospitals

RT @smalljones: RT @FTC: Copy of #FTC 's Julie Brill's @unc_law speech: #Privacy & Consumer Protection in Social Media: ...

RT @FTC: Copy of #FTC 's Julie Brill's @unc_law speech: #Privacy & Consumer Protection in Social Media: #nclrsymp2011

To keep content like this from becoming public, Kawski argued, the office would have to conduct a careful review, using what is known as a “balancing test” to determine if the statutory presumption of openness is outweighed by other considerations. Moreover, “We would argue that the balancing test should be applied to each and every email.” The number of emails at issue for the longer time period encompassed by the AP’s request, he said, has been estimated at 125,000. He allowed that this would take “a great deal of time.”

Ostergren began advocating for reform in 2003 when she created her web site, and two years later she began her practice of publishing unredacted documents on that site. The controversy sparked by her web site led to the amendment of Section 59.1-443.2, which prohibited the intentional communication of a person’s social security number, to remove the exception for “records required by law to be open to the public.” After the Virginia Attorney General announced his intention to prosecute Ostergren under the amended statute, Ostergren brought suit under Section 1983, seeking to have the law declared unconstitutional under the First Amendment as applied to her publication of copies of public records lawfully obtained from the government.

Postings on social networks are generally governed by the federal Stored Communications Act, which regulates how private information can be disseminated in non-criminal matters. The law has been interpreted to mean that the sites don't have to hand over users' personal data in response to a civil subpoena. Defense lawyers, though, have devised a strategy to work around this roadblock: They ask judges to order plaintiffs to sign consent forms granting defendants access to their private material. The defendants then attach these consent forms when they subpoena the sites. In these subpoenas, the plaintiffs are essentially authorizing the sites to hand over printouts of the private portions of their pages to the defendants.

This is an interesting case on the FOIA frontier, the boundary between privacy and new security technologies.

EPIC, in its 2009 FOIA requests, sought among other things "all unfiltered or unobscured images captured using body scanning technologies." The Department of Homeland Security coughed up 1,766 pages of documents but withheld the 2,000 images apparently taken during training. The images, federal officials said, showed "various threat objects dispersed over the bodies."



Read more: http://blogs.mcclatchydc.com/law/2011/01/epic-tries-and-fails-to-see-secret-whole-body-scanning-images.html#ixzz1AsUHYqyU

“From my perspective in dealing with public records, there’s concern about confidentiality of human resources and personnel records. There’s also concern with ongoing investigations,” Evans told The Iowa Independent. “That has to be balance against the public’s interest in records and know what’s going on on our campuses.”

New #FOIA Documents Reveal DHS Social Media Monitoring During Obama Inauguration #privacy

Now cyberspace has everted. Turned itself inside out. Colonized the physical. Making Google a central and evolving structural unit not only of the architecture of cyberspace, but of the world.

“People thought what they had was an address book for an e-mail program, and Google decided to turn that into a friends list for a new social network,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, an advocacy group in Washington. “E-mail is one of the few things that people understand to be private.”

Mr. Rotenberg said that his organization planned to file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission claiming that the Google’s use of e-mail conversations to build a social network was unfair and deceptive.

In an expletive-laden article that was widely cited on the Web, a blogger who writes about issues related to violence against women complained that Google had made her fearful. She said that she had unexpectedly discovered a list of people, which may have included her abusive ex-husband or people who sent hostile comments to her blog, following her and her comments on Google Reader, a service for reading blogs and automated news feeds.

In a report released today, EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston tells the story of a bogus federal subpoena issued to independent news site Indymedia.us, and how the site fought back with EFF’s help. Declan McCullagh at CBSNews.com also has the story.

With cameras, GPS, mobile Internet come ever more dangerous surveillance possibilities, allowing an observer, once they have succeeded in gaining control of the phone, to turn it into a sophisticated recording device. However, even a simple phone can be tracked whenever it is on the network, and calls and text messages are far from private. Where surveillance is undertaken in collusion with the network operator, both the content of the communication and the identities of the parties involved is able to be discovered, sometimes even retrospectively. It is also possible to surreptitiously install software on phones on the network, potentially gaining access to any records stored on the phone.

The ridiculous thing about OpenID is that it has no value unless loads of people buy in, which I assume is why there have been so many "we will support OpenID mumble-mumble" announcements in recent months. If it gains any traction at all, it's going to be just like the consumer credit system without all that pesky government oversight getting you a free personal report once a year and going after abusers. It's a cute technical approach to a big, hairy social status quo, and I'm sitting here writing a big-ass diatribe about it because I don't want to find myself forced into signing up for a SomeBigCo account two years from now and getting all my shit stolen or sold, ChoicePoint-style.

Is the Internet surveillant? Without question. But is the Internet surveillant after the manner of the panopticon? We cannot answer this question by means of sociological accounts that are simply interested in the government and corporate tendency to get to know us better through Internet spying, The panopticon does not use information just to know us; it also deploys information to create us, to constitute us as compliant workers and consumers. Essentially, if it is panoptic, the Internet must serve the same panoptic/enlightenment function of social control through a physical control of the body in space and a rhetorical control of the definition of subjectivity that other panoptic institutions do.

EDF is suing John Doe for defamation based on this page, and has subpoenaed The Funded to get user records. See http://www.mlive.com/news/annarbornews/index.ssf?/base/news-29/1219329624312290.xml&coll=2

GOOLASH keeps you logged out from the search engine of Google, regardless of any other "G" services you might be using, like Gmail for example. GOOLASH keeps your web searches disassociated from your Google username, meaning that the results are not being filtered according to the profile Google has on you, neither the context of your requests is being attached to your persona. Doing some trickery with cookies GOOLASH cuts the tentacles of monstrous corporation away from your brain and CPU. Say NO to augmented reality of Google empire, embrace unfiltered content!

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has concocted a remarkable new policy: It reserves the right to seize for an indefinite period of time laptops taken across the border.
A pair of DHS policies from last month say that customs agents can routinely--as a matter of course--seize, make copies of, and "analyze the information transported by any individual attempting to enter, re-enter, depart, pass through, or reside in the United States." (See policy No. 1 and No. 2.)

yet another death-the-net story, this from Canada re cable regulatorium

"Law enforcement agencies at every level are exploiting fears about terrorism and child safety to encourage lawmakers to strip away statutory privacy protections for library records," says the ALA. "This eliminates anonymity in the library, and encourages

database of wages for immigrants hired under H1B visas - national salary survey database. many details, much data.

tracking human behavior on a large scale based on mobile phones as sensors. we move in narrow orbits most of us

In the context of online social networking, surveillance is something potentially empowering, subjectivity building and even playful – what I call participatory surveillance.

If you can't post something nice, don't post anything at all.

The new model creates a more trusted environment for reaching high-value, frequent purchasers, whether of airline tickets, electronics, clothes or other items. Where does that leave the less-frequent purchasers? Probably looking to their friends rather th

pre-beacon pronouncements by Facebook's Dave Morin on how important privacy is - captured on video.

In making Facebook's useless-information-production apparatus central, the real value of the network decreases.

A copy of a customer service email sent from Hotwire in response to a complaint regarding Facebook's new Beacon advertising system.

One who intentionally intrudes, physically or otherwise, upon the solitude or seclusion of another or his private affairs or concerns, is subject to liability to the other for invasion of his privacy, if the intrusion would be highly offensive to a reason

Except as otherwise stated above, Hotwire will not disclose your personal information with any third party without your consent. (except that they will give it to Facebook who will beacon it to all your friends).

50 US states and their library privacy laws; a huge variety, with lots of details.

This wiki was created following the NISO Usage Data Forum, 1-2 November 2007, in Dallas, TX primarily to provide a place for folks who care about library and scholarly usage data to work together to develop a decision framework to help those organizations

lots about how to slice up library data, nothing about patron privacy in the process

security, usability, and privacy issues with openid.

In the last month, I've received almost a dozen panicked emails from people who had commented on my blog at one point or another and were horrified to find that their comment was at the top of Google's search for their name. In each case, I have respectfu

This is what your public profile looks like to someone who is not logged in to Facebook. (Time to put a proper bland photograph on it, I guess)

Identity provision will increasingly be tied to social networks. Our lives are being lived online more and more, our friends will be living their lives online too. There will be a whole class of people who are un-provenanced, their lives are not online.

RFID: "Et tu, Brute?" -- Killing Some RFID "Truths"

interview in a hair salon where everyone uses Myspace!

dory leifer on the solution space for providing guest access to the net, wired or wireless.

New Jersey state law protects library records and forces the police to get a subpoena to search them.

library spying faq

doe v gonzales - librarians can finally reveal that the feds are snooping into library checkout records

Today four Connecticut librarians spoke publicly for the first time about their experience as recipients of a National Security Letter (NSL) demanding library records.

patroit act and library records in connecticut

now, some of google's billions will be spent on legal fees to protect their customers from being spied on by the government.

one stop shopping for personal information