Is this how all future Privacy lawsuits
will be resolved?
MainJustice has an update
to the LinkedIn lawsuit concerning their massive hack last year.
As expected, LinkedIn moved to dismiss on the grounds
that the plaintiff hasn’t suffered any harm and hasn’t
proved they used outdated security, but the plaintiff responds that
harm is irrelevant – she wouldn’t have purchased a premium
account if it hadn’t been for their representations of “industry
standard” security. MainJustice has also uploaded a copy of the
court
filing.
We should think before each
transaction...
Jasmine McNealy writes:
Most Americans now
have extensive digital footprints comprised of the Tweets, Facebook
posts, LinkedIn profiles, Instagram photos, and other material they
share online.(a) And this easily accessible public
persona is just the tip of the iceberg. We may think our web
searches, shopping habits, browsing history, and email archives are
private, but this data is often one of the most valuable assets for
companies like Google and Amazon.
The law, however,
has yet to catch up. We still do not have clear answers to basic
questions such as: Do people own personal information about
themselves? How can they control or limit how companies (and
governments) use it? To start, there are complexities around the
fundamental issue of information “ownership,” particularly
ownership of personally identifiable information (PII). One cannot
be said to actually own information about one’s self.
Information relates to you, is connected to you, or is of you.
Read more on Footnote1
I suppose everyone with an opinion
could make the headlines while this is still an issue. I just wish
they had an understanding of intelligence collection as well as the
pros and cons.
Timothy Edgar is a civil liberties
lawyer who has worked both for Mr. Clapper of the DNI and for the
American Civil Liberties Union. He offers his thoughts on increasing
transparency in an OpEd in the WSJ. Here’s an excerpt
President Obama
should go further, wresting control from the leakers and restoring
trust with the public. He should ask Mr. Clapper to look across the
intelligence community and disclose to the public the types of large
databases it collects in bulk, under what legal powers or
interpretations, and pursuant to what safeguards to protect
Americans’ privacy—while keeping necessary details secret.
Many aspects of
surveillance must remain secret. For example, the government
should never provide a list of companies from which it acquires big
data sets. [Just assume it's all of them? Bob]
Despite what Americans see in the movies, the NSA doesn’t actually
collect everything. Knowing which companies are included and which
are not would tip off terrorists about how to avoid detection—telling
them which providers to use and which to avoid. Likewise, the
government will never be able to confirm or deny whether particular
people are under surveillance, but it should avoid the temptation to
use this necessary secrecy to avoid meeting legal challenges to its
activities. The government has good arguments for why its programs
are both vital for national security and perfectly constitutional.
It should make them.
Read more of his OpEd on the Wall
Street Journal.
In “ye olde days” you were either a
recognized member of the tribe or you were a stranger/outsider/enemy.
Today recognition does not make you a member of the tribe.
Danielle Citron writes:
Professor Margaret
Hu’s important new article, “Biometric
ID Cybersurveillance” (Indiana Law Journal), carefully and
chillingly lays out federal and state government’s increasing use
of biometrics for identification and other purposes. These efforts
are poised to lead to a national biometric ID with centralized
databases of our iris, face, and fingerprints. Such multimodal
biometric IDs ostensibly provide greater security from fraud than our
current de facto identifier, the social security number. As
Professor Hu lays out, biometrics are, and soon will be, gatekeepers
to the right to vote, work, fly, drive, and cross into our borders.
Read more on Concurring
Opinions.
(Related)
Let’s just call this the privacy
outrage of the week:
If a girl younger
than 16 gives birth and won’t name the father, a new Mississippi
law – likely the first of its kind in the country – says
authorities must collect umbilical cord blood and run DNA tests to
prove paternity as a step toward prosecuting statutory rape cases.
Read more of this Associated Press
story on The
Item.
[From the article:
Supporters say the law is intended to
chip away at Mississippi's teen pregnancy rate, which has long been
one of the highest in the nation. But critics say that though the
procedure is painless, it invades the medical privacy of the mother,
father and baby. And questions abound: At roughly $1,000 a pop, who
will pay for the DNA tests in the country's poorest state? Even
after test results arrive, can prosecutors compel a potential father
to submit his own DNA and possibly implicate himself in a crime? How
long will the state keep the DNA on file?
For my amusement...
California
SB 520 is dead… for now. The bill “would have required the
state’s 145 public colleges and universities to grant credit for
low-cost online courses offered by outside groups, including
for-profits companies,” writes
Ry Rivard, but it faced overwhelming opposition from faculty who
argued that the state was planning to “outsource student learning
to for-profit companies that have not proven their courses can pass
muster.”
… According
to Politico’s new Morning Education, North Carolina has
pulled out of inBloom. This just leaves New York,
two districts in Illinois, and one
in Colorado that are working with the $100 million Gates
Foundation-funded data project.
… The Arkansas
Attorney General issued
a legal opinion this week, barring the state’s school districts
from employing teachers and staff as armed voluntary security
guards.
… Do students have to be Mirandized
before they’re questioned? Kentucky's Attorney
General is asking
the US Supreme Court to weigh in. [I'm assuming that
a “school resource officer” is some kind of cop. Bob]
For my students who think my tests are
too hard...
For all my students. Verrry
interesting.
No Excuse List, an exhaustive page of
links to skills you can learn, including art, computer programming,
cooking, DIY, and much more.
