. . . the Empire would have won. A search of records would have revealed where Luke Skywalker was living on Tatooine. A more efficient collection and aggregation of Jawa records would have located the droids immediately. Simple data analysis would have revealed that Ben Kenobi was really Obi Wan Kenobi. A search of birth […]
By Daniel J. Solove Law firms are facing grave privacy and security risks. Although a number of firms are taking steps to address these risks, the industry as a whole needs to grasp the severity of the risk. For firms, privacy and security risks can be significantly higher than for other organizations. Incidents can be […]
By Daniel J. Solove Once upon a time, there was a teacher who wanted to train people. At first, the teacher stated a list of things to do and not do. But this had little effect. The teacher was upset and started to doubt whether he could ever get through to people. But then […]
By Daniel J. Solove This post is co-authored by Professor Neil Richards The recent case of Google v. Vidal-Hall in the UK has generated quite a buzz, with Omer Tene calling it the “European privacy judicial decision of a decade.” The case illustrates several fascinating aspects of the developing global law of privacy, with big […]
By Daniel J. Solove When you go to the hospital, you might worry about catching a staph infection or pneumonia, but you should also worry about contracting a nasty case of medical identity theft. Most people suffer significant harm from medical ID theft, and few are completely cured. This ailment is spreading dramatically as data […]
By Daniel J. Solove Does scholarship really have an impact? For a long time, naysayers have attacked scholarship, especially scholarship about law. U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts once remarked: “Pick up a copy of any law review that you see, and the first article is likely to be, you know, the influence of […]
By Daniel J. Solove The law regulating government surveillance and information gathering is in dire need of reform. This law, which consists of the Fourth Amendment and several statutes, was created largely in the 1970s and 1980s and has become woefully outdated. The result is that law enforcement officials and intelligence agencies can readily find […]
By Daniel J. Solove It seems as though every week brings news of another batch of data breaches . . . and they’re getting bigger. Target. Home Depot. Sony. Anthem. The list goes on and on. The costs of many of these breaches are devastatingly large. And yet most data breaches are readily preventable. After […]
By Daniel J. Solove and Paul M. Schwartz This post is co-authored with Professor Paul M. Schwartz. This post is part of a post series where we round up some of the interesting news and resources we’re finding. For a PDF version of this post, and for archived issues of previous posts, click here.
By Daniel J. Solove Recently, Anthem, one of the largest health insurance providers, suffered a massive data breach involving personal data on up to 80 million people. According to Anthem, the data breached includes “names, dates of birth, member ID/ social security numbers, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses and employment information.”