Slashdot reports on the recently disclosed patent application by Amazon.com for "Persistently storing and serving event data," which describes a9.com's personal search history feature. Admittedly, I need to spend more time studying the privacy implications of "personalized searching" - the…
Tag: Privacy
Safeway Shopper Card Leads to (false) Arson Arrest
(via A blog doesn't need a clever name)Richard Smith at ComputerBytesMan writes about how a frequent shopping card database led to a false arrest:Tukwila, Washington firefighter, Philip Scott Lyons found out the hard way that supermarket loyalty cards can come…
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Update on ChoicePoint story & “Hackers”
More news outlets are finally covering this story (CNN, Reuters, ZDNet). Interesting, however, is that the AP story (picked up by the Washington Post, LA Times, and others) label the perpetrators as "hackers" who "penetrated the company's computer network." Nowhere…
ChoicePoint Data Stolen By Imposters
MSNBC reports that criminals posing as legitimate businesses have accessed critical personal data stored by ChoicePoint. ChoicePoint collects information from public records (they have contracts with at least 35 federal agencies to share data with them) and then combines it…
Electronic ID Cards Clear the House
(via PrivacySpot)The House of Representatives has passed legislation that would create a de facto national ID card. The bill mandates that federal employees (think airport security) only accept ID cards (think driver's licenses) that meet certain criteria. The cards must…
“Security Through Obscurity”
(via TechDirt, via The Raw Feed)A John Hopkins University student conducted a Google ego search recently and discovered that information she provided for the campus's "J-CARD" student debit card system was posted online -- along with data from 4,000 other…
Homeland Security Privacy Report Released
(via Emerging Technologies and Privacy Spot)The Privacy Office of the Department of Homeland Security released its first annual Report to Congress (pdf), covering its work from April 2003 to June 2004. I'll comment on the report once I've had a…
No Place to Hide
(Via Privacy Digest) The New York Times reviews Robert O'Harrow's new book No Place to Hide: Behind the Scenes of Our Emerging Surveillance Society:...Mr. O'Harrow provides in these pages an authoritative and vivid account of the emergence of a "security-industrial…
What Contracts Can’t Do: The Limits of Private Ordering in Facilitating a Creative Commons
Today I attended the latest Colloquium on Information Technology & Society hosted by the Information Law Institute (of which I'm a Student Fellow), at New York University School of Law. Professor Niva Elkin-Koren of Haifa University Law School gave an…
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The Digital Person
I just finished Daniel Solove's The Digital Person: Technology and Privacy in the Information Age. Here are excerpts from my review of the book for the academic journal Ethics & Information Technology....Solove, an associate law professor at George Washington University…
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