Paul Neuhaus, a reference librarian at Santa Clara University, has assembled a wiki of state laws on the confidentiality of library records. This is a great resource providing instant access to the relevant statutes, such as New York's: New York…
Read More Wiki of State Laws on the Confidentiality of Library Records
The social networking site Facebook is planning to to enter the behavioral targeting game, letting marketers customize their ads for the millions of Facebook customers who visit the site daily. Given the "mountain of information" users openly divulge on the…
Read More Facebook to Join Behavioral Targeting Game, and Might Win
The Center for Information Policy Leadership recently published a nice framework (PDF) for creating a multi layered privacy notice, whose benefits they outline in the introductory paragraph: Experts agree that good privacy begins with effective transparency. Transparency requires privacy notices…
From Wired's Ryan Singel: The FBI has quietly built a sophisticated, point-and-click surveillance system that performs instant wiretaps on almost any communications device, according to nearly a thousand pages of restricted documents newly released under the Freedom of Information Act.…
Read More FBI’s DCSNet Electronic Surveillance System Exposed
Given the obvious privacy concerns with Google's Street View imaging system (as well as Microsoft's Windows Live Local Virtual Earth), you would think providers of such services would make it easy for privacy-threatening content to be flagged and removed. While…
I am unable to reconcile an inconsistency between the common appeal search engines make that data retention laws require them to store user search query histories, and what these laws (where enacted) actually require. For example, this post at Google's…
Read More Does the EU Data Retention Directive Apply to Search Query Data?
You can file this in the "altogether not that surprising" category: The IT security firm Sophos has conducted a little experiment to see how easily it might be to obtain personal information from Facebook users. They created a fabricated Facebook…
Read More 41% of Facebook Users Share Personal Information with a Frog
Even while Earthlink seems to be stepping away from municipal wi-fi projects, San Francisco is introducing a non-binding ballot proposal to gauge citizen interest in blanketing the city in Google/Earthlink hotspots. Nathan Weinberg dug up a copy of the ballot…
Read More San Francisco’s Wi-Fi Plan on November Ballot Proposal
An anonymous post at the On The Identity Trail project’s blog, blog*on*nymity titled PETs are Dead; Long Live PETs! calls for increased attention by privacy advocates for technological solutions to privacy problems: Privacy advocates tend to react to information privacy…
I'm under deadline pressure currently, so very quickly: Declan McCullagh and Elinor Mills at CNet have surveyed the major search engine providers about their privacy practices related to retention of user data and behavioral targeting. Full story here, and the…
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