PRIVACY + SECURITY BLOG

News, Developments, and Insights

A-Rod, Rihanna, and Confidentiality

Over at Emergent Chaos, Adam Shostack raises an interesting issue regarding Alex Rodriguez (A-Rod) and confidentiality. According to the rules in place about the baseball steroid testing back in 2003, the results of these tests were supposed to be confidential. According to Gregg Doyel at CBS:

FreeCreditReport.com Spoof Song

I’ve blogged in the past about FreeCreditReport.com and the fact that I think it ought to be shut down. This is one of the rather obnoxious attempts by the credit reporting agencies to exploit people’s fears of identity theft as a tool to generate money. FreeCreditReport.com is not free. You can get your free credit […]

Why the Innocent Are Punished More Harshly Than the Guilty

The AP reports on a really tragic case of wrongful conviction: A man who died in prison while serving time for a rape he didn’t commit was cleared Friday by a judge who called the state’s first posthumous DNA exoneration “the saddest case” he’d ever seen. . . . [Timothy] Cole was convicted of raping […]

Criminalizing Google’s YouTube in Italy

In Italy, a rather disturbing prosecution is taking place. Google officials, including Chief Privacy Counsel Peter Fleischer, are being criminally prosecuted for a video somebody else uploaded to YouTube. According to an article by Tracey Bentley in the International Association of Privacy Professionals’ The Privacy Advisor:

Herring v. United States, the Exclusionary Rule, and Errors in Databases

Earlier this week, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Herring v. United States, a case examining whether the exclusionary rule should apply to a search that was based on an error in a database. In particular, due to a negligent error in a computer database indicating that there was an outstanding felony arrest warrant for Bennie […]

Privacy Expectations: Being Seen vs. Being Recorded

An interesting case from the Wisconsin Court of Appeals embodies what I believe is a thoughtful and nuanced understanding of privacy. The case is Wisconsin v. Jahnke, 2007AP2130-CR (Dec. 30, 2008). The case is a criminal prosecution of a man who secretly recorded his girlfriend in the nude, in violation of Wisconsin Statute § 942.09(2)(am). […]