What would have happened if the cards
had already been issued?
Oops. Via WBUR,
we learn of a breach involving Boston Public Schools.
Here’s the statement from BPS’s web
site:
The Boston Public
Schools is changing the design of Boston OneCard student ID badges,
changing MBTA CharlieCard assignments and is changing library card
numbers for students following a vendor’s loss of a flash drive
that contained badge sticker images Friday afternoon. The vendor,
Northborough-based Plastic Card Systems, is contracted to create
OneCard ID badges for the upcoming school year.
None of the
information contained on the drive can be used by an unauthorized
person to access student records or log-in to any electronic systems.
The sticker image data on the drive is limited to student names,
school, age, grade, ID number, library card number, CharlieCard
number and for about two-thirds of the cards, a photo. The drive did
not contain any confidential student contact information, such as a
home address, phone number, social security number or birth date.
The drive lost by
the vendor contains .pdf images that are used to print 21,054 student
ID badges for students across 36 schools
… Plastic Card
Systems reported the company could not find the drive after picking
it up from BPS on Friday afternoon.
[More]
Did the NSA get the idea from Google or
did Google get the idea from the NSA? Chicken/egg
Gmail:
You weren't really expecting privacy, were you?
I just finished reading Google's motion
to dismiss in response to a lawsuit alleging that its e-mail
scanning violates California privacy laws. And I'll say this: those
Google lawyers are towering writers, indeed. But on to the point:
did Google really argue in its rebuttal to the lawsuit that
Gmail users do not and never
should have an expectation of privacy when they're using Gmail?
I mean, they actually just came out and said it like that!?
Well, yes. But if you read the brief,
or the Gmail Terms
of Service, or even stop and think about what Gmail actually
does, that shouldn't come as a surprise, and it's nothing Google
hasn't baldly stated before. I'm not saying I like it, but it's
definitely not news. It's actually just how Gmail works.
… Google argues, the Electronic
Communications Privacy Act specifically permits such indexing and
automated scanning by email providers because it's "necessary"
for them to continue to deliver you free, Web-based email (that they
use as a vector for serving you ads). [Is there a
market for an email service that is not free but does not read your
mail? Bob]
… Google's brief points out that
"[u]nder federal law, the consent of a single party to a
communication is complete defense to any liability and so the consent
of the Gmail user alone is sufficient to bar a claim."
… Google reads your e-mail, knows
what's in your calendar, looks at your photos, and knows who your
friends are, and that's just via its in-house services. When you
include the breadth of its search, Google knows everything about you
that's public information, from your address to all your online
profiles to your marital status and much, much more.
Is this really so different?
Olivier Proust writes:
On June 19, 2013,
the French Court of Cassation ruled in favour of a company for having
dismissed one of its employee’s (M. X) on the grounds that he was
involved in unfair competition. M. X’s wrong-doing was based on
email exchanges between him and a competitor that were found on
his computer’s hard drive and used against him as evidence in
court. M. X argued that this evidence was inadmissible because it
was unlawfully obtained by the company in violation of his right to
privacy and to the secrecy of correspondence. M.X claimed that the
emails were private and that the company had made a copy of his
computer’s hard drive without informing him and not in his
presence.
Read more on Privacy
and Information Law Blog. The case provides for an interesting
contrast between French and U.S. standards. From my reading of
Proust’s commentary, had the employee put “PRIVATE” in the
subject line of the emails or stored them in a folder marked
“PRIVATE,” the outcome of the case might have been very
different.
Does this strike you as creapy?
Bill Chappell reports:
The city of London
has ordered a company to cease tracking the cellphones of pedestrians
who pass its recycling bins, which also double as kiosks showing
video advertisements. The bins logged data about any Wi-Fi-enabled
device that passed within range.
The company,
called Renew, recently added the tracking technology to about a dozen
of the 100 bins it had installed before London hosted the 2012 Summer
Olympics.
Read more on WUFT.
'The rest of the world' can see that we
are afraid of them.
Here’s another post from yesterday
that I should have restored earlier:
Om Malik interviewed PGP creator Phil
Zimmerman on the surveillance state. You can read excerpts of his
interview on GigaOm.
Here’s one of Zimmerman’s comments:
The surveillance
landscape is far worse than it has ever been and I feel like
everything we do is now observable. All of our transactions and
communications are all fused together into total information
awareness apparatus. I don’t think any of this can be fixed
merely by the application of cryptography. It is going to
require some push back in the policy space. We are going to have to
have Congress react to this and we need to get the population to
react, perhaps through the economic consequences we face of losing a
lot of business for American internet companies. Maybe American
internet companies can push back because of economic harm that comes
with the rest of world turning its back on us.
The pendulum swings. Give it a few
hundred years to settle down.
Jason M. Weinstein of Steptoe &
Johnson reviews recent litigation trends. His sympathies seem
clearly with the businesses and not government regulators or states
seeking to protect consumers:
Nearly every day
we read about another data breach at yet another major company in the
United States. Yet even more disturbing than the increase in data
breaches is the rise in efforts by regulators and class-action
lawyers to try to blame the victim companies for not doing more to
prevent those breaches. Federal regulatory agencies, most notably
the Federal Trade Commission, and numerous state attorneys general
have targeted victim companies in the wake of cyberattacks.
These same
regulators have also aggressively pursued companies for alleged
privacy violations based on the companies’ own collection and use
of personal data.
Read more on Steptoe
& Johnson.
Update: Thompson
& Knight have also issued a client alert about the FTC’s
“aggressive” stance. Of course, some of us see that as A Good
Thing.
Not everything, but a simple start...
… The header is a part of the email
message that most people never even see. It contains a lot of data
that seems like gobbledygook to the average computer user, so as
email use became a daily tool in everyone’s life, email clients
started to hide this information out of convenience for you. These
days, it can even be a bit troublesome to unhide the header, even for
those who know it is there.
Record retention is not simple.
Yes, Virginia, if you don’t store it
forever, you’ll have less cost protecting it or producing it:
A ruling by the
High Court on the issue of dealing with data subject access requests
highlights the positives that can be derived by businesses that
decide to dispose of personal data records they no longer need, an
expert has said.
Read more on Out-Law.com
Is it that we're not teaching research
skills or we're accepting a level of research that we could have
achieved back in the days of scrolls and quill pens?
New
on LLRX – Rebooting Legal Research in a Digital Age
Via LLRX.com
– Rebooting
Legal Research in a Digital Age: Steven
A. Lastres writes that research has always been core to the
practice of law. However, the results of a recent survey Steven has
authored identified a “New Normal” in today’s business climate
that has a profound effect in the delivery of legal services and
impacts how research is conducted.
For my students and other professors.
Fidus
Writer
Fidus Writer is an online collaborative
editor especially made for academics who need to use citations
and/or formulas. The editor focuses on the content rather than the
layout, so that with the same text, you can later on publish it in
multiple ways: On a website, as a printed book, or as an ebook. In
each case, you can choose from a number of layouts that are adequate
for the medium of choice.
Current events?
It seems these days as if you’re not
getting anywhere unless you have a channel on the automation
juggernaut known as IFTTT (If
This Then That). In the past, we have highlighted lots of other
companies who have allowed us to automate their service using IFTTT
(the most recent one being
Gmail attachments). But now the newspaper giant The
New York Times has jumped right in with both feet with
their own IFTTT channel, enabling you to have various stories and
features from the NYT sent to you automatically. For those who love
to read the news, this one could be heaven-sent.
There are currently 71
“recipes” on IFTTT which involve the NYT in some way, and
this includes the following 5 which immediately jumped out at me:
And what is even better is that you
don’t need a NYT subscription to take advantage of these recipes.
Just stick to your free NYT monthly quota and the recipes will work
just fine without having to pay for a subscription.
Simplify, simplify, simplify.
See
and Print Pages More Clearly With Evernote Clearly
Evernote
Clearly is a free browser extension available for Firefox and for
Chrome. Clearly can strips the sidebar content from any webpage that
you're viewing. You can send the cleaned-up version directly to your
Evernote account for easy reading whenever you open your Evernote
account. You can print the cleaned-up article from your Evernote
account or directly from your web browser.
Evernote
Clearly is an excellent extension for teachers to use before
printing articles to distribute to their students to read in class.
Stripping the sidebar content not only saves ink and paper it also
makes it also creates a distraction-free reading experience for your
students. Evernote Clearly can also be used to highlight sections
of an article. And if you have students that need webpages read
to them, Clearly has a text to speech capability that your
students can use.
For my website students
Layout your pages in minutes for
beautifully responsive pages on desktops, tablets and smartphones.
Add divs to separate the different sections of your page. Add,
remove, rename and nest divs with a click of a button until you’re
happy with the layout. Resize each div according to how you want it
to appear on each device.
For all my students.
New
on LLRX – Student Research Resources on the Internet
Via LLRX.com
– Student
Research Resources on the Internet: Marcus
P. Zillman’s new guide is a comprehensive pathfinder
that identifies reliable, actionable and high value research
resources and sources on the Internet that will provide students with
key benchmarks for their studies.
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