Recently, I was interviewed for an article in the Globe and Mail about the young teenage father-to-be involved in the media circus surrounding vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s pregnant teenage daughter. I believe that the media should restrain itself from prying further into Palin’s daughter’s private life, as well as that of the father-to-be. He […]
Professor Lior Strahilevitz (U. Chicago Law School) has an interesting post about Franz Kafka’s papers. The famous story about Kafka’s papers is that Kafka asked his friend, Max Brod, to burn them after his death. Although Kafka had published a few works during his lifetime, a great many stories, parables, letters, and diary entries were […]
In today’s Wall Street Journal, Gordon Crovitz has an op-ed arguing that we’ve gotten over privacy: We seem to be following the advice of Scott McNealy, chairman of Sun Microsystems, who in 1999 said, “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.” And the observation by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison: “The privacy you’re concerned about […]
I’ve written an article for the September issue of Scientific American magazine called The End of Privacy? The article is available online here, with a slightly different title: Do Social Networks Bring the End of Privacy?.
Pursuant to the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA), people’s campaign contributions must be accessible to the public. I’ve long found this to be problematic when applied to the campaign contributions of individuals. Certainly, information must be reported to the government to ensure that campaign contribution limits aren’t exceeded. But I don’t know why it is […]
A recent New York Times article by Brad Stone discusses a website called CriminalSearches.com, which allows you to punch in a name of a person and do a search for any criminal records about him or her. From the article:
Over at WSJ blog, Dan Slater writes about a Fair Housing Act case involving a condo association that prohibited all objects in hallways. A Jewish resident challenged the rule under the Fair Housing Act because his mezuzah was removed, claiming the rule discriminated against his religion. The 7th Circuit held for the condo association [link […]
I have been following the new FISA Amendments Act of 2008, but I have refrained from chiming in, as many others have been doing terrific blogging on the issue. Of particular note:
Over at the New York Times’s Bits blog, Brad Stone writes: Researchers call this the privacy paradox: normally sane people have inconsistent and contradictory impulses and opinions when it comes to their safeguarding their own private information. Now some new research is beginning to document and quantify the privacy paradox. In a talk presented at […]
The TSA, in its never-ending quest to inconvenience us without keeping us safe, has once again changed its rules on identification. According to the old rule, if you didn’t provide ID at the airport, you would be subjected to secondary screening. Now, you may be denied the right to fly entirely. According to the TSA: