Would You Surrender Your Privacy for A Chocolate Bar?

How valuable is your online privacy? Would you pay for it? Or would you, like some research subjects, surrender your computer password in exchange for a chocolate bar or a cup of premium coffee? Tech critic Declan McCullagh used the occasion of Data Privacy Day 2010 to ponder these questions…

Data Privacy Day, Education, and Action

Happy Data Privacy Day! Data Privacy Day (January 28, 2010) encourages a dialogue among businesses, individuals, government agencies, non-profit groups, academics, teachers and students about how advanced technologies affect our daily lives. This dialogue connects directly with ALA’s effort to spark a national conversation about privacy in America and we are pleased to recognize this event! It’s been a busy week in the realm of privacy and technology…

Choose Privacy Week event in Boston

You’re invited! Help us launch Choose Privacy Week at a fun and exciting event, featuring Hal Niedzviecki, author of The Peep Diaries: How We’re Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbors. The event will take place during the ALA 2010 Midwinter Meeting from 4 – 5 p.m. on Saturday, January 16...

Digital Marketing, Privacy & the Public Interest

Protecting Privacy, Promoting Consumer Rights and Ensuring Corporate Accountability

Perhaps the most powerful - but largely invisible - force shaping our digital media reality is the role of interactive advertising and marketing. Much of our online experience, from websites to search engines to social networks, is being shaped to better serve advertisers. Increasingly, individuals are being electronically "shadowed" online, our actions and behaviors observed, collected, and analyzed so that we can be "micro-targeted." Now a $20 billion a year industry [2007 estimates] in the U.S., with expected dramatic growth to $80 billion or more by 2011, the goal of interactive marketing is to use the awesome power of new media to deeply engage you in what is being sold: whether it's a car, a vacation, a politician or a belief. An explosion of digital technologies, such as behavioral targeting and retargeting, "immersive" rich media, and virtual reality, are being utilized to drive the market goals of the largest brand advertisers and many others.

A major infrastructure has emerged to expand and promote the interests of this sector, including online advertising networks, digital marketing specialists, and trade lobbying groups.

The role which online marketing and advertising plays in shaping our new media world, including at the global level, will help determine what kind of society we will create.

EFF Asks Court to Suppress Evidence Illegally Gathered From Password-Protected Phone

Our cell phones aren't just for calls anymore. They hold our address books, our calendars, our emails, and our grocery lists. They may even include things like a list of questions to ask your doctor, pictures of your girlfriend, or URLs of web sites you've visited. When can police search your phone and look at all this information?

That's the question that EFF is asking a court in California to consider. In People v. Taylor, police in Daly City, California seized a suspect's iPhone during his arrest. Hours later, investigators bypassed the password and searched through the data on the device without a search warrant. After the officers realized that the information was too extensive to write down, they finally obtained a warrant to search the phone.

EFF has urged the court to suppress evidence gathered by police from the suspect's phone during the warrantless search, including contacts, called phone numbers, emails, text messages, Internet search history, and photos. EFF has also asked the judge to quash the warrant that was eventually issued in part based on the information illegally accessed on the phone.

Of course, criminal suspects will have a lot of information on their cell phones that might be of interest to police, and when investigators have enough evidence to get a warrant, they should be able to search these devices. But if the police can search anyone's cell phone at any time, then everyone's privacy is at risk.

The court will hear the motion on February 18 at 9:00 a.m. in Redwood City, California.

Revised Google Books Settlement Fails to Fix Key Problems

Even after revisions, the Google Books Settlement still fails to address antitrust, privacy, and copyright concerns, according the the US Justice Department, privacy advocates, and academic authors.On February 4, the Justice Department filed a brief and issued a statement opposing the revised settlement. The Department said the revisions still ran afoul of authors' copyrights and did not fix antitrust problems. EPIC also continues to object to the settlement because it does not contain adequate privacy protections for readers. On February 4, EPIC informed the court of its intent to appear at the February 18 Fairness Hearing on behalf of users' privacy interests. For more information, see EPIC: Google Books and Privacy, EPIC: Google Books Litigation, and EPIC: Google Books: Policy Without Privacy.
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DHS exempts dossiers used for “targeting” from the Privacy Act

In a final rule published last week at 75 Federal Register 5487-5481, the Department of Homeland Security has exempted most of the data used by the illegal “Automated Targeting System - Passenger” (ATS-P) from the various requirements of the Privacy Act that information used to make decisions about individuals must be accessible to them on [...]
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EFF Fights for Cell Phone Users’ Privacy in Thursday Hearing

Government Should Come Back With a Warrant If It Wants Location Information Philadelphia – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) will be arguing this Thursday before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit in Philadelphia, urging the court to block a government attempt to seize telephone company records detailing a cell phone user’s past locations without first [...]
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Examiner: Woman worms into D.C. taxpayer accounts

The Examiner has another story about an insider being accused or convicted of abusing her access in order to violate individual privacy, in this case taxpayers’ financial data privacy. Such cases of access misuse are numerous. A few include: a retired clerk at the New York Department of Taxation pled guilty to stealing the identities of [...]
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Authors Guild: ‘To RIAA or Not to RIAA’

There’s equal reason to support or object to the proposed Google Books settlement. Creating a digital catalog of the worlds’ words might be the Holy Grail of intellectual empowerment. Yet building that library in the clouds would be allowed without the rights-holders’ consent — which the Justice Department and others contend is a complete and fundamental alteration [...]
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