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Reporter's Story — How HP Kept Tabs On Me
Posted by Zonk on Thursday October 19, @06:36PM from the in-case-you-were-wondering dept. HP Businesses Media
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "An outside lawyer working for H-P, John Schultz, yesterday told Wall Street Journal reporter Pui-Wing Tam how H-P's investigators collected information on her for a year, scoping out her trash and compiling a dossier on her phone calls. From Tam's article about her time spent, unwittingly, under surveillance: 'H-P's agents had my photo and reviewed videotaped footage of me, said Mr. Schultz, of the law firm of Morgan, Lewis & Bockius. They conducted "surveillance" by looking for me at certain events to see if I would show up to meet an H-P director. (I didn't.) They also carried out "pre-trash inspections" at my suburban home early this year, Mr. Schultz said. ... But what was surprising were the questions Mr. Schultz left unanswered: How did H-P's agents get my phone numbers in the first place? When did they review videotaped footage of me? Did their gumshoes park their cars outside my house at night? And what the heck is pre-trash inspection?'"
October 17, 2006 11:48 AM Posted By News Questions & comments 0
Hewlett-Packard and Corporate Authority to Eavesdrop on Employees
by Alexander Wolfe, Editor at Large
The uproar over the Hewlett-Packard spy scandal has brought to the forefront the issue of companies spying on their own employees. Executive employees of Hewlett-Packard employed private investigators to spy on members of HP’s board in an effort to determine where leaks pertaining to internal operations originated from, and they are now facing criminal charges in California. But to what extent may a company legally monitor the activities of its employees, both in and out of the work place?
Generally, employees have a reduced expectation of privacy in the work place. Public employees enjoy some protections [Are we 'second class' citizens if we don't work for the government? Bob] as a result of the application of the Fourth Amendment to state and local governments, but employees of private employers have historically not received much protection of their privacy. Congress dealt with such privacy issues only incidentally in the last 1960’s with the passage of a comprehensive wiretap law that essentially made it illegal to intercept communications between persons. This law was updated in 1986 by the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which extended the protections of the original wiretap law to e-mail and other electronic communications. Because of exceptions in the law that created uncertainty of the extent to which the act regulated private employers, legislation was introduced in Congress that would not ban electronic monitoring, but would provide that employers must give notice to employees that they may be monitored while performing job-related duties. This legislation failed to make it out of committee.
Many states make provisions for the protection of an employee’s privacy. Some states, such as California, recognize employee rights in the workplace where a reasonable expectation of privacy exists. However, state courts have undermined such protections in narrow readings of such an expectation as it relates to video surveillance and e-mail.
Employees who find themselves the target of monitoring or surveillance can in some instances pursue a remedy at common law for tortuous invasion of privacy. As with much state legislation, an objectively reasonable expectation of privacy is key, and even where such an expectation is found it can be outweighed by the countervailing legitimate business interests of the employer. Many employees have found this to be a high hurdle to overcome, as in a Texas case where an employee had no privacy expectation in a password protected personal folder on the company’s network, or another where the employee had no privacy expectation in personal emails despite the employer’s assertion that the employee e-mails would remain confidential.
Such results have led some to call for greater protection of employee privacy rights, in the form of an Employee Privacy Bill of Rights or model statutes on electronic monitoring, or drug testing. However, efforts to increase employee privacy protection at both the state and the federal level have not met with much success in recent years.
Money?
The real reason that Google bought YouTube?
The $1.65 billion purchase of the video-sharing site could actually be a boon for traditional TV ads.
FORTUNE Magazine By David Kirkpatrick, Fortune senior editor October 19 2006: 3:03 PM EDT
NEW YORK (Fortune) -- When Google spent $1.65 billion for 19-month-old online video phenomenon YouTube, it was portrayed as a sign of the triumph of online video. And in important ways it is. But the voluminous coverage missed something central. Google's interest in the video-sharing site, ironically, also has a lot to do with its belief in the staying power of conventional broadcast television and cable.
It's important in watching Google never to forget that it makes just about all its money from advertising. The fact that its role in advertising keeps growing is what, in turn, keeps its stock in the stratosphere, thus giving it the $128 billion market capitalization which enabled it to purchase YouTube with stock.
Many writers recently pointed to the obvious opportunity for a Google-owned YouTube to profit from placing video ads next to the 100 million video streams that YouTube claims users view there each month. That is surely one reason Google can justify paying so much money, but a closely-related reason may be even more important.
Google has for about a year-and-a-half been talking about its ambition, considered quirky or worse by some, to extend its auction-driven ad sales model beyond the net into what we think of as "old media." It has said it wants to get into the business of placing ads in print, radio and television.
Indeed, while last week's YouTube purchase was Google's largest, the second largest was January's $102 million acquisition of dMarc Broadcasting Services, a company with a successful automated system for placing ads on radio stations all over the country.
Television advertising is the biggest ad market of all, still dwarfing the Net. Last year it totaled $61 billion in the United States compared to the Net's $8 billion. Google executives confirm that the company bought YouTube in part to better position itself for getting into the business of selling traditional television advertising.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt has not been secret about his ambitions to do so. This summer at a conference he said Google would soon deliver "targeted measurable television ads" and complained that today when you watch TV you see commercials that are "a waste of your time," and "clearly not targeted for you."
What separates Google's current ad service from what has come before is its orientation towards results. Advertisers only pay for ads that attract user attention as evidenced by clicks. But the way Google enables its advertisers to get results has a lot to do with the process of repetition and refinement that identifies the most effective ads.
Google's most successful search advertisers are those who methodically experiment with multiple messages. Sometimes they try thousands of combinations of different texts displayed in response to various search keywords, quickly - often in hours - eliminating those that don't attract the clicks of users and refining those that do, until they arrive at the ideal combination of message and keyword.
A similar process of refinement takes place in Google's AdSense service. It places ads on the Web sites of affiliates with which it shares ad revenues.
I don't know if they're right, but Google's managers now seem to believe they can do the same thing with print, radio and TV, albeit with much of the testing taking place on the more immediate and low-cost medium of the Internet. Buying YouTube will give Google a platform on which advertisers can experiment with TV ads in different forms.
If you were a big TV advertiser, before you spend what is sometimes millions for a primetime spot, wouldn't you like to know how it fared on YouTube compared to alternate versions? How many people willingly chose to view it? How many clicked through for more information? Did it perform better adjacent to some kinds of content than others? Presumably Google has a variety of ideas about how it could help advertisers evaluate TV ads online before placing them offline.
If Google can offer advertisers such tools to test the efficacy of offline ads, it could put them in a far better position to also assist in placing those ads. Google can buy ad inventory in TV, radio, and print to place ads there it pre-tested online. If it chose to, I suppose, it could even create its own offline media products on which to host such ads. (This part is purely my speculation, by the way.)
When Google advertising boss Tim Armstrong first explained to me that he believed the repeat-and-refine approach used for search ads could be extended to other media, I was skeptical and didn't understand. Now, in the wake of the YouTube deal, I finally think I do.
Google's competitors are mostly still trying to figure out how to better take advantage of today's online advertising opportunity. Meanwhile, Google is already looking ahead to a still-to-come era when the Web links tightly with all other media.
Is this the beginning?
Friday » October 20 2006
YouTube deletes 30,000 files after Japanese copyright complaint
Canadian Press Friday, October 20, 2006
TOKYO (AP) - The popular U.S.-based video-sharing Web site YouTube has deleted nearly 30,000 files over copyright concerns after being asked by a group representing Japan's entertainment industry.
The Japan Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers, found 29,549 files such as video clips from TV programs, music videos and movies posted on YouTube's site without permission, said Fumiyuki Asakura, an official from the organization, on Friday.
The group found the files posted by users without authorization from Japanese copyright holders during research done earlier this month, Asaskura said.
Acting on behalf of 23 Japanese TV stations and movie and music companies, the group asked YouTube to remove the copyrighted materials, he said.
San Bruno, California-based YouTube quickly removed all the files requested, he said.
Most videos posted on YouTube are homemade, but the site also features volumes of copyrighted material - a problem that has caused some critics to predict the startup eventually would be sued.
Asakura said the entertainment industry group is considering asking YouTube to introduce a preliminary screening process to prevent illegal video clips from being posted.
Since YouTube started in February 2005, the company has blossomed, now showing more than 100 million video clips per day.
YouTube's worldwide audience was 72.1 million by August, up 2.8 million from a year earlier, according to comScore Media Metrix.
Storage volumes also impact record retention and of course the volume of information gathered via electronic discovery...
Storage budgets may not keep up with demand in 2007
Gartner study finds that 26 percent to 37 percent of managers worldwide planned to increase spending
By Robert Mullins, IDG News Service October 19, 2006
... Fifty-five percent of the IT managers surveyed said their biggest storage challenge was keeping up with growing demand, estimating that their capacity needs would grow by an average 25 percent in one year and by 41 percent in two years.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6064364.stm
Charles Darwin's works go online
The complete works of one of history's greatest scientists, Charles Darwin, are being published online.
The project run by Cambridge University has digitised some 50,000 pages of text and 40,000 images of original publications - all of it searchable.
Surfers with MP3 players can even access downloadable audio files. [Darwin raps? Bob]
... The historian said he was inspired to build the library at darwin-online.org.uk when his own efforts to study Darwin while at university in Asia were frustrated.
http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1161162316074
Reporters Not Required to Turn Over Computers to Pa. Attorney General
Asher Hawkins The Legal Intelligencer October 19, 2006
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has blocked state Attorney General Tom Corbett's effort to force newspaper reporters in Lancaster, Pa., to turn over their computers in connection with an investigation of alleged leaks from the Lancaster County coroner to local media.
In In re 24th Statewide Investigating Grand Jury, a six-justice majority agreed that forcing the journalists to cede their entire hard drives would be akin to asking them to hand over their filing cabinets.
But the court unanimously agreed with Common Pleas Senior Judge Barry F. Feudale, who is supervising the grand jury proceedings, that there is no reason for the attorney general not to make available to Lancaster Newspapers Inc. a copy of the previously undisclosed document that officially kicked off the investigation. [isn't the court saying there was no reason to keep the document secret in the first place? Bob] Lancaster Newspapers publishes the Intelligencer Journal, Lancaster New Era and Sunday News.
... Werner's co-counsel in the case, William DeStefano of Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney in Philadelphia, said the current investigation was sparked when the Lancaster County coroner's office, for the sake of convenience, showed local reporters how to access electronically information they regularly received over the phone from coroner's office staff.
Should it be: “No leak, no foul?” Would the HP Board have followed this rule?
http://techdirt.com/articles/20061019/101559.shtml
'No Harm No Foul' Becoming The Norm In Data Breach Lawsuits
from the no-blood-no-foul dept
Back in April, a judge ruled that Wells Fargo should not be penalized for a data breach because there was no evidence that those who acquired the data had done anything criminal with it. This seemed like poor reasoning; Wells Fargo had no control whether anyone would use the data in a criminal manner, but it did have control over how it stored the data. In that case, data was lost because it was stored in an unencrypted format on a laptop. Certainly some could argue that that was negligent. But it looks like this line of reasoning is becoming standard. A recent suit brought against data broker Axciom for letting customer data slip out was dismissed since the plaintiffs couldn't prove that anything bad had been done with it. Again, either the company was negligent in letting personal data out, or it wasn't; that should be the measure upon which these cases are decided, not what was done later with the data. There is a flipside, which is that if plaintiffs started winning these cases, data breach lawsuits could easily become the latest class action charade (We can see the commercials now, "Has your personal data been leaked? Call the law offices of..."). But companies can't keep getting let off the hook just because harm can't be proven, or they'll have little incentive to protect the data.
October 19, 2006
New Laws and Machines May Spell Voting Woes
By IAN URBINA
WASHINGTON, Oct. 18 — New electronic voting machines have arrived in Yolo County, Calif., but there is one hitch: the audio program for the visually impaired in some of them works only in Vietnamese.
“Talk about panic,” said Freddy Oakley, the county’s top election official. “I’ve got gray-haired ladies as poll workers standing around looking stunned.”
As dozens of states are enforcing new voter registration laws and switching to paperless electronic voting systems, officials across the country are bracing for an Election Day with long lines and heightened confusion, followed by an increase in the number of contested results. [Isn't that obvious? Bob]
... “We’ve got new laws, new technology, heightened partisanship and a growing involvement of lawyers in the voting process,” said Tova Wang, who studies elections for the Century Foundation, a nonpartisan research group. “We also have the greatest potential for problems in more places next month than in any voting season before.”
... “We’re expecting arguments at the polls in these states that will slow everything down and probably cause large numbers of legitimate voters to be turned away or to be forced to vote on provisional ballots,” said Barbara Burt, an elections reform director for Common Cause.
Meanwhile, votes in about half of the 45 most competitive Congressional races, including contests in Florida, Georgia and Indiana, will be cast on electronic machines that provide no independent means of verification.
“In a close race, a machine error in one precinct could leave the results in doubt and the losing candidates won’t be able to get a recount,” [Take THAT Al Gore! Bob] said Warren Stewart, policy director for VoteTrustUSA, an advocacy group that has criticized electronic voting.
... Whether there are problems or not, post-election litigation is likely. A study released this year by the Washington and Lee Law Review found that the number of court cases challenging elections has risen in recent years. In 2004, the number was 361, up from 104 cases in 1998.
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