On December 16, 2010, the U.S. Commerce Department released its report, Policy Framework for Protecting Consumer Privacy Online While Supporting Innovation. It will be interesting to compare and contrast.
Category: Uncategorized
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FTC Staff Issues Privacy Report
From the FTC: “The Federal Trade Commission, the nation’s chief privacy policy and enforcement agency for 40 years, issued a preliminary staff report today that proposes a framework to balance the privacy interests of consumers with innovation that relies on consumer information to develop beneficial new products and services. The proposed report also suggests implementation of a “Do Not Track” mechanism – likely a persistent setting on consumers’ browsers – so consumers can choose whether to allow the collection of data regarding their online searching and browsing activities.”
Find the report here.
Find the full release here.
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Ultimate Privacy: How to Disappear, Erase Digital Footprints & Vanish Without a Trace
Interesting Network World article posted in mid September: “As privacy seems harder to hold onto in this digital age, privacy expert Frank Ahearn can help you legally poof and fall off the grid….”
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Flight attendants union upset over new pat-down procedures
From a Phoenix local ABC station, widespread complaints over increasingly invasive manual inspections that follow the decision to opt out of body scanning.
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Salon: Did the FBI cook up a fake bomb plot?
Justin Elliot explains how the recent Washington Metro bomb plot case involved questionable use of a paid FBI informant. Story here.
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Unmasking an Internet User, Piece by Piece
An impressive and impressively terrifying walk-through of the process of discovering all there is to discover about an internet user, starting with only their IP and email address.
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Firesheep Evolved
Shorter but not necessarily sweeter: Idiocy
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Facebook Privacy: Gay Users Outed to Advertisers
Article via Ars Technica in which researchers discovered that Facebook may inadvertently be outing gay users to its advertisers.
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Chief Justice John Roberts doesn’t read EULAs either
In a recent appearance at Canisius College, Chief Justice John Roberts addressed two interesting questions from the floor. One concerned the issue of televised oral arguments. Roberts expressed concern about the hesitation some might feel when answering questions on camera for an invisible and potentially limitless audience. The question here seems to be one that has troubled courts for some time: how much and what type of publicity is appropriate to an open court system? The other–and the more well reported–question concerned end-user licensing agreements (EULAs) for software and web-based services. Robert flatly admitted that he does not read the fine print, noting that the sheer amount of information contained in such agreements tends to defeat the purpose of disclosure. He went on to say that “the legal system obviously is to blame,” and that he had no answer to the problem. That the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court would simply click-through such agreements is but an extreme example of the problem that Yannis Bakos, Florencia Marotta-Wurgler, and David R. Trossen have already demonstrated in their excellent paper, “Does Anyone Read the Fine Print?“: that there are nowhere near enough term-conscious users to discipline companies who might employ unfavorable terms. And as the write-up from TechDirt further notes, Roberts’ admission also casts doubt on the legal standing of such instances of mindless assent.