by Dionne Searcey, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
Big Brother is watching. That is the message corporations routinely send their employees about using email.
But recent cases have shown that employees sometimes have more privacy rights than they might expect when it comes to the corporate email server. Legal experts say that courts in some instances are showing more consideration for employees who feel their employer has violated their privacy electronically.
by Andrew LaVallee, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
Face.com is opening its photo-tagging system, based on facial-recognition technology, to Facebook members Wednesday.
Photo Tagger, which launched to a limited group of users in July, scans a user’s photo albums on the social-networking site, then lets him tag faces it identifies.
by Jonnelle Marte, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
A new Oklahoma law that will allow the state to publish detailed information about abortion patients online has created uproar from critics who view it as a blow to women’s rights and is providing the latest fodder in the debate over online-data privacy.
by Marisa Taylor, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
Despite growing concerns about online privacy on social networks such as Facebook, marketers at the Social Data Summit in New York on Thursday professed enthusiasm for social media marketing.
by Paul Ohm, Associate Professor of Law and Telecommunications,
University of Colorado Law School
Today brings news relating to one of the central examples in my paper: Netflix has announced plans to commit a privacy blunder that could cost it millions of dollars in fines and civil damages
by Simon Dumenco, Columnist, Ad Age, The Media Guy
Oh, those clever birds at Twitter. When the microblogging service announced recent changes to its terms of service, its executives knew exactly how to spin the news.
There have been a few cases recently that have involved previously-anonymous commenters getting outed by the courts. Where’s the line between free speech and getting unmasked?
by Andrew LaVallee, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
The Federal Trade Commission is planning three public discussions, starting in December, devoted to technology and consumer privacy.
According to the FTC, the roundtables will address topics such as social networking, cloud computing, online advertising and mobile marketing, the goal being “to determine how best to protect consumer privacy while supporting beneficial uses of the information and technological innovation.”
by Seth Schoen, Staff Technologist, Electronic Frontier Foundation
Sounds like Mr. X is pretty anonymous, right? Not if you’re Latanya Sweeney, a Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor who showed in 1997 that this information was enough to pin down Mr. X’s more familiar identity–William Weld, the governor of Massachusetts throughout the 1990s.
by Andrew LaVallee, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
Ten privacy groups urged Congress on Tuesday to take greater steps to limit advertising that tracks consumers’ behavior online.
The coalition, which included the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Consumers Union and Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, singled out behavioral advertising, in which Internet users are tracked, analyzed and served ads based on the information gleaned from their movements, in its recommendations.
Veterans suffering anxiety and paranoia following the theft of a government hard drive containing the medical histories and Social Security numbers of 198,000 of their brethren cannot recover financial damages, a federal appeals court says.
European privacy regulators could be about to throw a spanner into the works of attempts by social networking sites such as Facebook to find new ways to increase profits as they try to restrict the way internet groups release personal data.
Those who are deeply disturbed about the rise in location-based applications and services and their impacts on personal privacy can breath a small sigh of relief tonight. Google, which recently entered the space with its Latitude location network feature, has agreed to take a stand for user location privacy, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
by Andrew LaVallee, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
A federal judge dismissed a Pittsburgh couple’s suit against Google, rejecting their claim that the Internet giant’s Street View feature violated their privacy.
Google Maps’s Street View, which launched in 2007, shows street-level maps of some cities. The couple, Christine and Aaron Boring, sued Google in April (our Law Blog colleagues wrote about it), accusing it of negligence, unjust enrichment and trespassing, in addition to privacy violation, because photos of their home appeared in Street View.
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