Sometimes lost just means lost...
http://news.com.com/CD+with+medical+data+of+75%2C000+is+found/2100-1029_3-6167435.html?tag=cd.top
CD with medical data of 75,000 is found
By Milt Freudenheim Story last modified Thu Mar 15 05:04:14 PDT 2007
A missing CD containing confidential medical and personal information on 75,000 Empire Blue Cross and Blue Shield members was recovered Wednesday.
Erin Sommers, a spokeswoman for Magellan Behavioral Services, a managed care company that monitors payments for mental health and substance abuse cases of insurers, said the company received a telephone call Wednesday morning saying that the CD was delivered by mistake to a residence in the Philadelphia area. The CD had been missing since January.
... The recipients were assembling a new audio system when they found the Magellan disc among the packages, she said.
... Both companies said that they are no longer sending patients' information without coding protection. Failure to provide adequate security protection for individuals' medical records is prohibited by privacy laws.
Much ado has become nothing...
http://news.com.com/Calif.+court+drops+charges+against+Dunn/2100-1014_3-6167187.html
Calif. court drops charges against Dunn
By Leslie Katz Story last modified Thu Mar 15 06:17:47 PDT 2007
A California judge on Wednesday dismissed the charges against former Hewlett-Packard Chairman Patricia Dunn in the HP spying scandal.
The three other remaining defendants--former HP attorney Kevin Hunsaker; private detective Ronald DeLia; and Matthew DePante of data-brokering company Action Research Group--pleaded no contest to a count of fraudulent wire communications at Santa Clara County Superior Court in San Jose, Calif., the state attorney general's office said in a statement. The trio will be required to complete 96 hours of community service by September 12; the court said it will dismiss the case against them if that condition is satisfied.
Dunn, for her part, did not enter a plea.
"We have maintained from the beginning that Pattie Dunn was innocent and thus vigorously fought the charges against her," said Dunn's attorney, James Brosnahan, of the firm Morrison & Foerster. "Today, the judge dismissed the case. Ms. Dunn did not plead to anything. This is the right result."
... Originally, California charged five people with four felonies, including conspiracy and identity theft. In January, the state dismissed its case against the fifth HP defendant, Bryan Wagner, a Colorado man believed to have been an employee of Action Research, when he pleaded guilty to federal charges relating to his role in HP's internal investigation of boardroom leaks. Under California law, the state cannot prosecute a defendant for conduct that the defendant has already been tried for in another jurisdiction.
Must reading.
http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/86719
UNESCO states position on ethical issues in the information society
UNESCO has published a brochure entitled "Ethical Implications of Emerging Technologies" (PDF file) dealing with the consequences of the use of RFID chips, biometric identification systems, and location-based services (LBSs). Written by lawyers from the US, the brochure was published as part of the "NGO Geneva Net Dialogue" in which non-governmental organizations stated their case after the UN World Summit on Information Freedom and the Internet Governance Forum.
... The authors call for the establishment of an advisory board within UNESCO to advise politicians in matters concerning information ethics.
... Finally, a generally applicable code of ethics should be worked out for information technologies, taking the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a guideline.
Take down specified material while considering
Write huge, nasty article describing the weak brains making the request
Watch many times more users access the material when you put it back...
http://techdirt.com/articles/20070312/174754.shtml
Court Says That Taking Down Content After Nastygram Isn't An Agreement To Never Discuss Again
from the good-ruling dept
Over on Dave Farber's Interesting People mailing list, there's news that an Appeals Court has found that simply taking content offline after a lawyer nastygrams you is not an agreement to stop discussing the subject. In the case at hand, an unhappy patient of Lasik eye surgery created an anti-Lasik website where he trashed his doctor. The doctor got upset, and his lawyers nastygrammed the website owner -- who, like many people when first nastygrammed, pulled the site offline. A trial court said that, in taking down the content, the website owner was effectively giving up his right to discuss the doctors again -- which seems quite stifling of free speech. Luckily, the Appeals Court agreed and found that taking down content is not the same as waiving your First Amendment rights. Note that this is entirely separate from the question of whether or not the content itself was defamatory -- but just whether the action of taking down the content is some sort of agreement to give up the right to discuss the topic.
In the US, garbage is in the public domain... Right?
http://calsun.canoe.ca/News/Alberta/2007/03/14/3748396-sun.html
Defence says cops trashed privacy
By KEVIN MARTIN, SUN MEDIA
Garbage picking cops crossed the line when they reached into a suspected drug producer's trash receptacle and pulled out critical evidence, a lawyer argued yesterday.
Better?
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/03/taking-steps-to-further-improve-our.html
Taking steps to further improve our privacy practices
3/14/2007 03:00:00 PM
Posted by Peter Fleischer, Privacy Counsel-Europe, and Nicole Wong, Deputy General Counsel
When you search on Google, we collect information about your search, such as the query itself, IP addresses and cookie details. Previously, we kept this data for as long as it was useful. Today we're pleased to report a change in our privacy policy: Unless we're legally required to retain log data for longer, we will anonymize our server logs after a limited period of time. When we implement this policy change in the coming months, we will continue to keep server log data (so that we can improve Google's services and protect them from security and other abuses)—but will make this data much more anonymous, so that it can no longer be identified with individual users, after 18-24 months.
... This also means providing clear, easy to understand privacy policies that help you make informed decisions about using our services.
... Of course, you can always choose to have us retain this data for more personalized services like Search History. But that's up to you.
... If you want to know more, read the log retention FAQ (PDF).
Get over it?
http://techdirt.com/articles/20070313/213014.shtml
Is Your ISP Selling Your Clickstream Data? Do You Have Any Privacy At All?
from the privacy-nightmare dept
Alexa-competitor Compete Inc.'s CEO David Cancel told conference attendees Tuesday that there's a pretty good business for ISPs to sell your (just slightly) anonymized clickstream data. This explains how Compete Snapshot gets its data -- though, early reviews suggest the data isn't very good. This isn't aggregate data. The ISPs are literally selling the fact that "user 1" went to this particular list of sites in this order. He doesn't say who's buying the data (besides making it clear that he's a customer), but you can bet some of the hedge funds are making good use of it in determining what's hot as well. Still, as is noted in the article, this is "much worse" than last summer when AOL released search stream data. In that case, at least, AOL meant well in releasing the data for research purposes. In this case, it's selling your surfing habits for pure profit -- though, the "risks" are smaller since it's not nearly as easy for anyone to get their hands on the data. Of course, it probably isn't particularly hard to take that data and figure out who many of the "anonymous" users are, if someone wanted to do so. It would be interesting to see if users could make a case for this violating their privacy -- though, it would be quite difficult for any particular individual to find out if their ISP is doing this since, once again, the data is private. It's just one more reminder that your privacy may not be as private as you believe -- and also a reminder that figuring out how to surf the web over an encrypted system isn't a bad idea if you want to keep your surfing habits private.
Aren't we? (See next article)
http://techdirt.com/articles/20070312/002120.shtml
China Using Great Firewall To Spy On Business Deals?
from the sneaky,-sneaky dept
Over there years, there have been plenty of articles on the Great Firewall of China, so yet another one by itself wouldn't be that interesting. However, this lengthy piece in the Australian has one tidbit that hasn't been discussed much elsewhere, which is that China may not just be using its router-based censorship for blocking access to certain content, but also for corporate espionage purposes. Not much in the way of details is given, but the article opens with a story of a US businessman negotiating a deal in Beijing with a large state-owned Chinese company -- and he's surprised to note that each morning the other side starts the discussions with whatever key points he had emailed back to the home office the night before. He believed that the Chinese government (or by proxy via an ISP) was intercepting the messages and handing them over to the firm he was negotiating with. There aren't any details (or even names) with which to verify the story (so it should be taken with a fairly large grain of salt), but it is a reminder that a censorship system need not only serve to block out content, but also to monitor what's being done as well.
http://www.expatica.com/actual/article.asp?subchannel_id=19&story_id=37609
Bos investigates bank info to US
14 March 2007
AMSTERDAM – Finance Minister Wouter Bos is surprised at reports that the US intelligence services have access to data on Dutch bank account holders. "This is news to us and a reason for concern for myself and my colleagues," the minister said.
Bos announced that an investigation would be launched. He and Justice Minister Ernst Hirsch Ballin want to know how far the tentacles of the US services reach into the Dutch financial world. Bos promised to report to Parliament before the end of April, the Volkskrant reports.
... The US is interested in all conceivable streams of financing in its war against terrorism. It was already clear in 2002 that Belgian company Swift, which arranges bank-to-bank transactions worldwide, was giving information to the Americans.
The Dutch government took no action at the time. Bos said "little could be done by Dutch or European law then because it involved a private company."
Now the case is different however because the Americans reportedly directly requested information from the Dutch banks. Bos first wants to know whether the US services approached the public prosecution department initially with a request for legal assistance in the matter.
... Financial spokesperson for the Labour faction Ferd Crone was not satisfied with Bos's comment that banking regulator De Nederlandsche Bank does not concern itself with the privacy of bank clients.
Will this become a major issue? “You slowed my access, I missed a trading deadline, you cost me millions!” worse: “You gave preferential treatment to my competitor!”
http://techdirt.com/articles/20070314/100137.shtml
Comcast Enforces Invisible Broadband Caps
from the guess-we-missed-that-*-after-unlimited dept
Unlimited: not limited or restricted in terms of number, quantity or extent. Seems pretty straightforward, right? Apparently not to broadband providers, who seem to interpret it a bit differently. Because they've marketed their services as unlimited, then done a poor job of designing their networks, they get upset when people actually take advantage of those supposedly unlimited connections, and complain that they're screwing everything up for all their other users. Comcast is the latest to start giving people the boot for using too much bandwidth, even though they don't have a published limit. When pressed by a reporter, a company spokesman wouldn't give any specifics, just that it's "roughly the equivalent of 13 million e-mail messages or 256,000 photos a month", which is hardly helpful. While these companies are certainly well within their rights to put caps on the services they sell (even though it's an annoying practice for many consumers), they need to disclose them clearly to users, and not market their services as if they're unlimited. They also then need to give users ways to track how much bandwidth they've used -- for instance, Cox emails subscribers that go over its disclosed bandwidth caps, and in lieu of pointing them to tools where they can track their monthly usage, it just pushes them to get a more expensive "business" account. While caps may be an annoying way to cover up poor networks or to create tiered levels of service, they're not the real issue here. The real issue is the way broadband providers hide the caps and other restrictions on their services deep in the fine print -- if at all -- where they're far out of sight of their marketing materials.
...or you could donate a million dollars and see if you get invited to sit courtside at a basketball game.
http://www.courier-journal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070315/NEWS01/703150473
High court hears UofL donor suit
Decision won't come for several months
By Jason Riley jriley@courier-journal.com The Courier-Journal
FRANKFORT, Ky. -- The public has a right to know who is donating money to the University of Louisville Foundation and what they may receive in return, [Right? Bob] an attorney for The Courier-Journal told the Kentucky Supreme Court yesterday.
... But Mike Risley, an attorney for the foundation, told the court that a donor's right to privacy outweighs the public's interest. And Risley said making the names public could have a chilling effect on donations.
... Sixty-two of more than 47,000 donors requested anonymity, according to attorneys for both sides.
Anonymity aside, were the facts correct?
http://www.nysun.com/article/50507
Secret Blogger Seeks Protection
BY Staff Reporter of the Sun March 15, 2007
An Orthodox Jewish blogger is asking a judge to protect her anonymity from a Long Island elected official who has gone to court to identity the blogger.
The elected official, Pamela Greenbaum, a member of the school board for Lawrence, L.I., asked a state judge last month to force Google to identify the writer behind a popular Web log for the orthodox community in the Five Towns area.
The blog, orthomom.blogspot.com, featured a posting in January critical of Ms. Greenbaum's position regarding the use by yeshiva students of public school facilities. In guest comments to the postings, Ms. Greenbaum has been called a "bigot."
... "It doesn't seem to me that a school board member ought to be suing to find out the identity of her critics," the lawyer, Paul Levy of the Public Citizen Litigation Group, said. "Harry Truman said, ‘If you can't take the heat get out of the kitchen,' What ever happened to that?"
Ms. Greenbaum has suggested that she intends to file a defamation lawsuit against either the blogger or commentators on the blog.
Interesting, perhaps even useful?
OpenCongress
OpenCongress brings together official government data with news and blog coverage to give you the real story behind each bill.
After you issue an apology, is it more difficult to start other lawsuits?
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/14/2220210&from=rss
EFF Forces DMCA Abuser to Apologize
Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday March 14, @08:35PM from the depths-of-my-mothers-basement-I-stab-at-thee dept. Censorship
destinyland writes "The EFF just announced victory over a serial abuser of DMCA copyright notices. To set an example, their settlement required Michael Crook to record a video apology to the entire internet for interfering with free speech. He's also required to withdraw every bogus DMCA notice, and refrain from future bogus notices, never contest the original image again, and take a remedial class on copyright law. He'd attempted to use flaws in the DMCA to censor an embarrassing picture of himself that he just didn't want appearing online — but instead the whole thing backfired."
Who knew physicists had a sense of humor?
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/14/172226&from=rss
Stephen Hawking Says Universe Created from Nothing
Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wednesday March 14, @02:25PM from the preparing-hell-for-people-who-ask-questions dept. Science News
mr_3ntropy writes "Speaking to a sold out crowd at the Berkeley Physics Oppenheimer Lecture, Hawking said yesterday that he now believes the universe spontaneously popped into existence from nothing. He said more work is needed to prove this but we have time because 'Eternity is a very long time, especially towards the end.' There is also a Webcast available (Realplayer or Real Alternative required)."
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