privacy
choofnagle | February 13, 2009I'm very pleased with today's decision from the DC Circuit Court of Appeals on recently-strengthened privacy protections for phone records. The short history goes something like this: the FCC created strong opt-in (affirmative consent) provisions for the sharing of phone records (who calls whom, for how long, etc). In 1996, the 10th Circuit held that the restrictions violated the First Amendment rights of companies that wanted to sell this data to marketers. Thus, the FCC relaxed the standard to opt-out, meaning that you had to take affirmative action to stop your phone records from being…
choofnagle | February 3, 2009I'll be on Minnesota Public Radio this morning with LA Times consumer reporter David Lazarus, talking about identity theft. Here's the preview and I'll post the stream later. I'm going to be talking about my recent articles on identity theft: Identity Theft: Making the Known Unknowns Known and Towards a Market for Bank Safety.
choofnagle | January 15, 2009"All that remains is . . . recognition of a man."
Patrick McGoohan, the creator of one of my favorite television series, The Prisoner, has died at 80. The Prisoner was a challenging and entertaining series that explored civil liberties, privacy, individuality, and democracy. My favorite episodes were Free for All and A Change of Mind. The good news is that these and all the other episodes are available online free at AMC.
choofnagle | January 12, 2009I am really proud of my colleagues here at UC Berkeley for performing a first of its kind (in the US) study of the efficacy of police surveillance cameras. Its findings are limited to San Francisco's system, but it is valuable in thinking through whether and how surveillance cameras should be implemented. I have to be careful about characterizing it, but here is an article in the Chronicle on its findings, and the full report is here (8.9 MB PDF). The authors explain: "...The findings include a determination that while the program decreased property crime within the view of the cameras by…
choofnagle | October 21, 2008In years as working as a privacy advocate, I developed the theme that the private sector, particularly marketing companies, was an equal threat to information privacy as the government. After all, the largest providers of personal information to the government now are big marketing companies, like Acxiom and Choicepoint.
At a more base level, I thought privacy may be instrumental in fostering autonomy and shielding individuals from (what I believe to be) the indignities that marketing perpetuates on our culture (think billboards, for instance). This is a very difficult argument to make.…
choofnagle | October 21, 2008There are many problems with political spam email. Perhaps the most well known one is that Congress, in passing the CAN-SPAM Act, decided to exempt political messages from any forms of legal accountability. And so the only practical limit on political spam is the public's willingness to shame candidates. Here's an example worth shaming, sent on to me by a colleague.
If you get political spam from McCain, and want to opt out, here are your options.
Notice that all of them imply that you support or have supported McCain! They are:
-I am a McCain Supporter but don't wish to be contacted…
revere | April 4, 2008The Global War on Terror is claiming yet another victim: the reputation of Attorney General Michael Mukasey as a principled guardian of the Rule of Law. Even before joining the Bush administration Mukasey was forgetting the meaning of the word "torture," and since being confirmed is equally benighted regarding privacy. Now he is peddling shoddy goods linking terrorism and software piracy. Does this former judge have no shame? Via Preston Gralla at Computer World Blogs:
In a talk last week before at the Tech Museum of Innovation, Mukasey used his best fearmongering tactics to link software…
revere | February 22, 2008Recently we posted on the insanity of requiring informed consent for posting a hygiene checklist in the ICU. This week the New England Journal of Medicine weighed in.
Here's some background from the NEJM Commentary:
About 80,000 catheter-related bloodstream infections occur in U.S. intensive care units (ICUs) each year, causing as many as 28,000 deaths and costing the health care system as much as $2.3 billion. If there were procedures that could prevent these infections, wouldn't we encourage hospitals to introduce them? And wouldn't we encourage the development, testing, and dissemination…
revere | February 19, 2007Sarah Silverman is a comedienne on cable's Comedy Central, and although I haven't seen her new show, I've seen the trailers while watching The Daily Show. On one of them she is talking to school children and saying something like, "If they can put a man on the moon, they can put a man with AIDS on the moon." Then there's a pause while the times for her show are hyped. When she returns she adds, "And then maybe they can put everyone with AIDS on the moon." Or something like that. It's funny. Sort of. Until you read the latest report of Congress's non-partisan investigative arm, The General…