Sunday, June 28, 2015

Could this work in the US?
Out-Law.com reports:
According to a report by Media Lawyer, High Court judge Mr Justice Nicol earlier this month ruled that an unnamed student can use Instagram to notify an unnamed accused of legal proceedings he is bringing against the accused. Anonymity has been preserved in the case.
It is believed to be the first time a judge has allowed legal claims to be served via Instagram, although judges have previously allowed legal claims to be served via other social media platforms.
Read more on Out-Law.com.




Another procedure that will need to be modified? Was it unreasonable to expect a request for this data? Looks like they missed an opportunity to push “lawyer ads.” (Does “removed” mean “deleted?”)
Toby Sterling and Anthony Deutsch report:
Facebook must turn over any information it possesses that could help a young woman find out who published a sex video of her without her consent, a Dutch court ruled on Thursday.
The Amsterdam District Court said in its ruling that if the U.S. company cannot comply because it has erased the relevant data — as it argues — it must allow an external expert access to its servers to verify that.
Read more on Reuters.
[From the article:
Facebook had argued that the user who posted the video had done so from a fake account and said it had erased all information relating to the post from its servers, along with the video itself, in February.
"The offending account was ultimately deleted before we received any request for user data, so all information about it was removed from our servers in accordance with our terms and applicable law," Facebook said in a statement emailed to Reuters.


(Related) Same folks, different tune. “For the government, we never delete a thing!”
Trevor Timm writes:
State-of-the-art facial recognition technology, which had been the stuff of hypothetical privacy nightmares for years, is becoming a startling reality. It is increasingly being deployed all around the United States by giant tech companies, shady advertisers and the FBI – with few if any rules to stop it.
In recent weeks, both Facebook and Google launched facial recognition to mine the photos on your phone, with both impressive and disturbing results. Facebook’s Moments app can recognize you even if you cover your face. Google Photos can identify grown adults from decades-old childhood pictures.
Read more on The Guardian.




As a non-lawyer, I explain it this way: Your next door neighbor gets all the legal permissions to open a gun powder factory. You notice that he stores all his finished inventory just on the other side of your fence. You also note that this is the “designated smoking area” for his employees. You don't suffer any harm until the inevitable explosion damages your property. You don't even get to claim the reduced property values as “damage.”
Damon W. Silver writes:
Among the multitude of unpleasant issues facing a company whose network has been breached is potential liability to customers and employees whose personal information has been compromised. However, recent district court decisions from around the country continue to limit the opportunity of those customers and employees to have their day in court. Specifically, these cases have held that, in order for a customer or employee whose data has been stolen to gain standing to sue the company that experienced the breach, the customer or employee must show that the stolen data was, in fact, used to the customer or employee’s financial detriment. And such financial detriment must be “concrete.” Increased risk of future harm does not suffice, damages are not recoverable for “mitigation” measures – such as the purchase of credit monitoring services – taken to protect against speculative future harm, and an individual’s allegations that he fears such future harm will generally not be enough to establish a claim for emotional distress.




Is this a big deal? “Don't tell them Fed-ral Educator nothin!”
Ashley Bateman writes:
Homeschoolers in Virginia are pleased a widely supported privacy measure designed to prevent the sharing of personal information passed with bipartisan support.
Senate Bill 1383, sponsored by state Sen. Dick Black (R-Loudoun), passed the Virginia state legislature in late winter, but awaited a final signature by the governor. Rather than endorse or veto SB 1383, Gov. Terri McAuliffe (D) remained neutral, allowing the bill to pass into law unsigned.
Read more on Heartland.org.
[From the article:
The new law “prohibits a division superintendent or local school board from disclosing any information from a Notice of Intent form or religious exemption letter to the Department of Education or other person or entity,” according to Home Educators Association of Virginia (HEAV).




This website is down (briefly, I hope).
beSpacific by Sabrina I. Pacifici
McKinsey – The Internet of Things – sensors and actuators connected by networks to computing systems—has received enormous attention over the past five years. A new McKinsey Global Institute report, The Internet of Things: Mapping the value beyond the hype, attempts to determine exactly how IoT technology can create real economic value. Our central finding is that the hype may actually understate the full potential—but that capturing it will require an understanding of where real value can be created and a successful effort to address a set of systems issues, including interoperability. To get a broader view of the IoT’s potential benefits and challenges across the global economy, we analyzed more than 150 use cases, ranging from people whose devices monitor health and wellness to manufacturers that utilize sensors to optimize the maintenance of equipment and protect the safety of workers. Our bottom-up analysis for the applications we size estimates that the IoT has a total potential economic impact of $3.9 trillion to $11.1 trillion a year by 2025. At the top end, that level of value—including the consumer surplus—would be equivalent to about 11 percent of the world economy [Exhibit].”




Imagine what will happen when they start selling shares!
Airbnb raises $1.5 billion, valuing it at an eye-popping $25.5 billion
… Airbnb, the well-known home rental service headquartered in San Francisco, has closed a new $1.5 billion funding round, according to reports from the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times. The round, which has been rumored for weeks, values the company at $25.5 billion—billions more than publicly traded neighbor Twitter, which had raised far less ahead of its highly anticipated 2013 IPO, and hotel giant Marriott, which runs more than 4,000 properties around the globe.




Why?
Wikipedia Available as a Printed Book
… Rob Matthews, a graphics design student from UK, converted 5000 pages of Wikipedia into a printed book in 2012. He downloaded few hundred featured articles from Wikipedia and bound them together in a physical book that was almost 1’7″ thick.
… Wikipedia does include a built-in book creator that would let anyone, include anonymous non-logged users, create ebooks from Wikipedia articles. You can download these ebooks as PDF files or send them to a print-on-demand service like Lulu or PediaPress and have a custom printed book made of your favorite Wikipedia pages.


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