Anonymous? How 18th century!
A Face Is Exposed for AOL Searcher No. 4417749
By MICHAEL BARBARO and TOM ZELLER Jr. August 9, 2006
Buried in a list of 20 million Web search queries collected by AOL and recently released on the Internet is user No. 4417749. The number was assigned by the company to protect the searcher’s anonymity, but it was not much of a shield.
No. 4417749 conducted hundreds of searches over a three-month period on topics ranging from “numb fingers” to “60 single men” to “dog that urinates on everything.”
And search by search, click by click, the identity of AOL user No. 4417749 became easier to discern. There are queries for “landscapers in Lilburn, Ga,” several people with the last name Arnold and “homes sold in shadow lake subdivision gwinnett county georgia.”
It did not take much investigating to follow that data trail to Thelma Arnold, a 62-year-old widow who lives in Lilburn, Ga., frequently researches her friends’ medical ailments and loves her three dogs. “Those are my searches,” she said, after a reporter read part of the list to her.
AOL removed the search data from its site over the weekend and apologized for its release, saying it was an unauthorized move by a team that had hoped it would benefit academic researchers.
But the detailed records of searches conducted by Ms. Arnold and 657,000 other Americans, copies of which continue to circulate online, underscore how much people unintentionally reveal about themselves when they use search engines — and how risky it can be for companies like AOL, Google and Yahoo to compile such data.
FYI
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/firstlook/index.html
Harvard Business School Case 306-001
The CEO of ChoicePoint, a leading company in the rapidly growing U.S. personal data industry, must reexamine the company's business model after a serious breach of data security affecting some 145,000 U.S. citizens. He must decide on steps to strengthen data protection in the company and clarify his stance on regulating a largely unregulated industry.
Purchase this case:
http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/b01/en/common/item_detail.jhtml?id=306001
Harvard Business School Supplement 306-082
Supplements the (A) case.
Purchase this case:
http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/b01/en/common/item_detail.jhtml?id=306082
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/09/0354216&from=rss
Blogging All the Way to Jail
Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wednesday August 09, @07:41AM from the takin-one-for-the-team dept. The Courts The Internet
Glyn writes "Time magazine is reporting on Josh Wolf the 'first blogger to be targeted by federal authorities for not cooperating with a grand jury.' Josh would have normally been protected from government coercion by California state shield laws but the prosecutors have argued its a federal matter, using quite shaky logic. Josh's blog is being updated by his mother, providing updates on what is happening. From the article: '"Not only does this logic seem silly," Wolf told TIME in June after receiving his final subpoena, "but if unchallenged it will have a deleterious effect on the state protections afforded to many journalists, both independent and those that are part of the established media." Judge William Alsup of Federal District Court rejected Wolf's arguments, and declared him in contempt of court. So he is now being held in a detention center in Dublin, Calif, where he could remain until next July.'"
[From the article: On Tuesday, Wolf was thrown into federal prison for refusing to testify before a U.S. grand jury and for failing to hand over unpublished video footage he shot during a raucous clash on the streets between San Francisco police officers and anti-G8 protesters last year. Wolf posted some of the video on his blog, and some clips were aired on TV newscasts that later paid Wolf for the footage. But the feds are demanding to see everything that wasn't made public. They allege that the unused portion of Wolf's video may show the patrol car being set afire — part of a federal crime, the government asserts. Wolf denies there is an attempted arson on his videotape.
Is this our future? Will DoJ not argue that we should have laws (and capabilities) equal to our allies?
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/08/1252220&from=rss
The UK's Total Surveillance
Posted by Zonk on Tuesday August 08, @09:29AM from the queen-watches-what-you-eat dept. Privacy Technology
Budenny writes "The Register has a story in its ongoing coverage of the UK ID Card story. This one suggests, with links to a weekend news story, that the Prime Minister in waiting has bought the idea that all electronic transactions in the UK should be linked to a central government/police database. Every cash withdrawal, every credit card purchase, ever loyalty card use ... And that data should flow back from the police database to (eg) a loyalty card use. So, for example, not only would the government know what books you were buying, but the bookstore would also know if you had an outstanding speeding ticket!"
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060803-7417.html
Tracking the Congressional attention span
8/3/2006 2:01:42 PM, by Nate Anderson
While text mining 330,000 New York Times articles poses an interesting challenge, it's not as interesting as sifting through 70 million words (from over 70,000 unique documents) found in the Congressional Record. A team of political science researchers has done just that (PDF), and found that their software was able to answer questions too difficult for humans to handle on their own.
Isn't this obvious?
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/08/08/MNGUEKD7HR9.DTL
Federal appeals court rules against workplace PC privacy
Bob Egelko, Chronicle Staff Writer Tuesday, August 8, 2006
(08-08) 17:27 PDT SAN FRANCISCO -- If you think the Web sites you access on your workplace computer are nobody else's business, think again.
That was the message today from the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, which upheld a Montana man's conviction for receiving obscene material that his employer found on his computer during a late-night raid.
"Social norms suggest that employees are not entitled to privacy in the use of workplace computers, which belong to their employers and pose significant dangers in terms of diminished productivity and even employer liability,'' said Judge Diarmuid O'Scannlain in the 3-0 ruling.
... "It seems like it's one more intrusion on people's privacy rights,'' he said. "There may be some things on my computer that I wouldn't necessarily mind someone at my office looking at, but I wouldn't want to share them with (law enforcement agents) or even the community at large.'' [Can we pick and choose our audience? Is there any form of sharing that can exclude law enforcement? Bob]
Ness' client, Jeffrey Ziegler, was director of operations for Frontline Processing, a Bozeman, Mont., company that handled on-line electronic payments. An FBI agent learned in January 2001 that an employee had accessed child pornography on a company computer and contacted Frontline's Internet technology administrator. [Probably not a manager, certainly not a corporate officer. Bob] The administrator said the Web sites had been traced to Ziegler's computer and that the company then started monitoring the computer with a recording device. [Official company policy or an intimidated employee's reaction to an FBI request? Bob]
At 10 p.m. that day, the court said, the administrator and his assistant got a key to Ziegler's office, entered and made copies of the computer hard drive, which they turned over to the FBI. While reserving the right to challenge the search, Ziegler pleaded guilty to one count of receiving obscene material and was fined $1,000 and placed on probation.
In today's ruling, the court said Frontline had notified its employees before Ziegler's arrest that their computers were company property, were not to be used for personal activities and were subject to monitoring. The court cited a 2001 American Management Association study, quoted in a California court decision, that said more than three-quarters of the nation's major firms monitored employee communications on the job, including e-mails and phone calls.
"Employer monitoring is largely an assumed practice,'' O'Scannlain said.
[More ... Bob]
http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/laborprof_blog/2006/08/no_workplace_pr.html
August 9, 2006
No Workplace Privacy Rights in Computer Used to Store Child Porn
... United States v. Ziegler, No. 05-30177 (9th Cir., Aug. 8, 2006)
There's a market for translations like this...
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/08/0419208&from=rss
The RIAA vs. John Doe, a Layperson's Guide
Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Tuesday August 08, @06:11AM from the i'm-the-juggernaut dept.
Grant Robertson writes to tell us that he has made a pass at translating a recent guide to surviving an RIAA lawsuit from technical lawyer-speak into a much more easy to understand layperson's guide. The law, being complex and sometimes cryptic, allows ways for the RIAA to tilt the odds in their favor forcing unsuspecting victims to settle rather than fight. Take a look at Ray Beckerman's tips to survival translated into words anyone can benefit from.
My “one more week” is still going on... Reducing the impact on employees increases the costs of discovery.
http://news.com.com/2010-1030_3-6103515.html?part=rss&tag=6103515&subj=news
For e-discovery, the times, they are a-changin'
By Eric J. Sinrod Story last modified Wed Aug 09 05:31:14 PDT 2006
Fasten your seatbelts, legal mavens. In less than six months, electronic discovery as we know it will undergo very important changes.
Amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) that take effect on Dec. 1 were supposed to help reduce litigation costs. The paradox is that electronic discovery costs may increase, especially with respect to work that must be performed within the first 120 days after a lawsuit has commenced.
The purpose of these new rules is to provide early structure, uniformity and predictability. But the reality is that right from the get-go, the parties in a lawsuit will need to start evaluating with their IT teams and outside counsel where they stand in terms of their own electronic data.
Easier said than done. Hunting for the relevant electronic information in a lawsuit can take time. Data may be located live on the network or on various servers. It may be in hard drives, laptops, PDAs--or on backup tapes.
Figuring out the logistics helps determine what electronic discovery to demand from the other side in a case. Plainly, a party should not expect to demand a category of electronic discovery that it's not willing to produce.
Keep in mind that electronic discovery is expensive. Cases often get resolved before the parties and counsel have invested time and effort--not to mention the expense--of carrying out electronic discovery search, retrieval and production procedures. By forcing these processes early on in a case--at least in federal courts, by way of the new FRCP amendments--opposing sides in a legal dispute will have no choice but to move forward with electronic discovery right from the start.
What's more, the new rules will broaden the definition of electronic items that may be subject to discovery from "documents" or "data compilations" to include all electronically stored information.
In the past, parties to a lawsuit might have tried to shield certain types of electronic information from discovery. But when the new rules take effect, the other side conceivably will be able to demand everything from standard Word documents and e-mails to voicemail messages, instant messages, blogs, backup tapes and database files.
Of course, they still can argue that the burden of any particular demand outweighs the potential probative value of the electronic information sought. For example, demanding parties cannot automatically expect that responding parties will restore and produce backup tapes. Responding parties can assert that these tapes are not reasonably accessible and that their production would cause undue burden. They can also claim that the value of the tapes pales in comparison to the recovery and production efforts that would be required.
Given that the provision of electronic discovery is burdensome and could be extremely costly if every bit of electronic data were reviewed very carefully prior to production, the new rules will allow parties to retrieve inadvertently produced privileged information. Because it is not difficult to mistakenly produce privileged or proprietary electronic information, some very sensitive trade secret information should be designated as "highly confidential" for the eyes of outside counsel only.
There has been a lot of worry about potential spoliation (destruction of evidence) arguments when certain electronic information has not been saved. Judges now will have the discretion to disallow sanctions when a party has lost electronic information as a result of the regular good-faith running of an electronic information system. Still, parties must have in place solid data retention policies and practices covering information that could be appropriate for electronic discovery.
None of the foregoing requirements are easy or cheap. But increasingly, we will need to deal with the burdens of the electronic age and not just its benefits.
http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/012068.html
August 08, 2006
Terror Finance Tracking Program Revelations Leave Public Divided
The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press: Public Holds Conflicting Views of Press Reports about Government Monitoring Bank Records, Released August 8, 2006.
"Summary of Findings - The public is of two minds about news reports that the government has been secretly examining the bank records of American citizens who may have ties to terrorist groups. By a margin of 50%-34%, Americans think that news organizations have hurt rather than helped the interests of the American people with these reports. However, an even larger 65%-28% majority believes that these news accounts told citizens something that they should know about."
Note how poorly DHS secures its computers... Would they even know if Osama was “reading their mail?”
http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/012073.html
August 08, 2006
DHS OIG InfoTech Audit
Information Technology Management Letter for the FY 2005 DHS Financial Statement Audit (Redacted), OIG-06-49 (PDF, 77 pages), 08/07/2006.
How to find a viable business model? Look for unsatisfied demand!
http://techdirt.com/articles/20060808/0843212.shtml
Bands With Online Popularity Want More Than A Gig In Second Life
from the turning-friends-into-fans dept
There was a time when bands would jokingly describe themselves as being "Big in Belgium", particularly if they had no discernible fan base locally. It's time to update that phrase to "Big on MySpace", as more and more bands are spreading their music and gaining loyal fans through the popular site. But while it's not new that bands are using MySpace to promote themselves, record labels should take note that many are finding it difficult to convert their online popularity to steady pay. The record labels are making a mistake by refusing to offer their services a la carte. If a band can do their own promotion, but needs help on the business and distribution side, then the labels should be eager to help out. At the moment, labels are skeptical of any band that claims only online popularity, citing the ability to game MySpace's friend lists. But it's pretty easy to discover what bands have passionate fans and which ones are just good at hyping themselves. Certainly, the music industry knows what hype looks like after all these years.
I told you this was useful technology.
http://techdirt.com/articles/20060808/1050216.shtml
Who Needs Harvard When You Can Blog?
from the withering-on-the-vine dept
Advances in technology have lowered the barriers to entry in many entrenched industries, and in turn have threatened incumbent industry leaders. One area, which isn't perceived to have seen much change is higher education, as the elite universities seem to be blessed with unlimited demand for admittance at almost any price. But while perception remains unchanged, technology may be eroding the advantages held by top universities. A new study suggests a professor's productivity (as defined by the amount of work published) used to be tied very closely to the professor's university, and that a professor moving from a second-tier school to Harvard could expect a major jump in productivity, simply by having access to the top minds in their field. But as the internet and other communication technologies have made it easier for academics to share information with others in their field (not just at one's own university), the relationship between one's output, and that of others at the same university has been eliminated. The rise of professors who write blogs on their subject is part of this trend, as more high-level discussion occurs outside the campus setting. Along the same lines, there's been a move to create high-quality, free academic journals, further eroding pockets of concentrated academic power. It may be too early to say the the notion of a university will undergo the same sort of spasms as other centrally controlled clusters, like TV networks, but the rise of peer-to-peer networking in academia should disrupt the dominance of a small group of elite institutions.
Pity a city and a bunch of poor doctors. Obviously they can't afford lawyers to review these contracts...
http://techdirt.com/articles/20060808/1444217.shtml
Make Sure Your Software Vendors Can't Lock Up Your Most Important Assets
from the an-important-lesson dept
Two totally separate stories today highlight the importance of recognizing the difference between "owning" a piece of software and just "licensing" it (an issue that's getting some attention in the courts these days). First comes the story of the parking garage in New Jersey that operates with a giant parking robot that moves the cars around, making more efficient use of the space. There was a contract dispute with the company who runs the parking robot, and its employees were kicked off the premises, taking the intellectual property rights of the software that runs the robot with them -- leaving the giant parking robot and the cars it had parked stuck in park. Then, there's the story of a bunch of doctors offices who used some proprietary patient medical records software called Dr. Notes. The company behind Dr. Notes decided to raise their license fees by a huge amount -- and doctors who refused to give in suddenly discovered they could no longer access their patients' records, presenting a fairly serious problem for those whose well-being depend on their doctor knowing their medical history. In both cases, the companies providing the licenses recognized (correctly) that this allowed them a tremendous amount of leverage in any future contract negotiation, since they could (literally, in some cases) lock up their customers' most important assets. For companies buying technology products who think things like the details of intellectual property law and licenses don't matter, perhaps these stories will make them a little more aware of a few of the reasons why it's important to understand what you license and what you own -- and recognizing that you never want to trust your most important assets to an outside vendor.
Serious implications or “it was obvious?”
It's your fantasy
Judge rules statistics not intellectual property of MLB
Posted: Tuesday August 8, 2006 7:07PM; Updated: Tuesday August 8, 2006 7:30PM
ST. LOUIS (AP) -- Fantasy baseball leagues are allowed to use player names and statistics without licensing agreements because they are not the intellectual property of Major League Baseball, a federal judge ruled Tuesday.
Baseball and its players have no right to prevent the use of names and playing records, U.S. District Court Judge Mary Ann Medler in St. Louis ruled in a 49-page summary judgment.
... But even if the players could claim the right of publicity against commercial ventures by others, Medler wrote, the First Amendment takes precedent because CBC, which runs CDM Fantasy Sports, is disseminating the same statistical information found in newspapers every day. [So if I can find the information online, I can consider it “free for the taking?” Bob]
"The names and playing records of major league baseball players as used in CBC's fantasy games are not copyrightable," Medler wrote. "Therefore, federal copyright law does not pre-empt the players' claimed right of publicity."
... Like many other fantasy baseball leagues, CBC had a licensing agreement with the MLBPA from 1995 through the 2004 season and paid 9 percent of gross royalties [Kiss that goodbye... Bob]to the association. The company now believes it shouldn't have to pay for the right to use statistics.
... "The idea on MLB's part is if you can scare all of the little companies out of the market," Colton said, "you can collect more money."
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