In 2005, a series of data security breaches affected tens of millions of records of personal information. I blogged about them here, here, here, here, and here. One of the major issues with data security breaches involves what kind of notification companies should provide. The spate of data security breach announcements began in February 2005, when ChoicePoint announced its breach […]
You’ve probably seen the commericals, which run incessantly on CNN and other cable channels. A happy young man says: “I’m thinking of a number . . . ” That number is a credit score, which you can obtain at a website called FreeCreditReport.com. You probably have heard that under a new federal law, credit reporting agencies […]
Blacklists appear to be the rage these days. With the ease of storing and sharing personal information — coupled with lax privacy law restrictions on such activities — companies can increasingly create blacklists of bad customers. In this article from the Ottawa Citizen [link no longer available], hotels in Australia and Canada (and soon the United States) are […]
Chris Hoofnagle (Berkeley’s Samuelson Clinic) has posted on SSRN his paper, The Denialists’ Deck of Cards: An Illustrated Taxonomy of Rhetoric Used to Frustrate Consumer Protection Efforts. From the abstract:
Hitachi has developed a new RFID chip, one that is much smaller than existing chips. This new chip is not that much bigger than the size of a grain of sand. RFID stands for “radio frequency identification.” RFID chips are tiny computer chips embedded into products and animals (and sometimes people) to identify and track them. […]
Since nearly everybody on this blog is chiming in with posts about exams, I thought I’d do a post about exams too. This post consists of the advice handout I give to 1Ls about taking law school exams. I haven’t handed it out recently since I haven’t taught 1Ls in a while, though I think […]
The New York Times reports: The Justice Department is completing rules to allow the collection of DNA from most people arrested or detained by federal authorities, a vast expansion of DNA gathering that will include hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants, by far the largest group affected. The new forensic DNA sampling was authorized by Congress in […]
A study by Javelin Strategy & Research finds that identity theft declined by 11.5% in 2006: According to the study, 8.4 million adult Americans, or one in 27, learned last year that criminals committed fraud with personal data such as credit card or Social Security numbers. That’s down from 8.9 million in 2005 and 10.1 million in […]
The Washington Post reports on an interesting little incident involving Tucker Carlson: Potomac Video store clerk Charles Williamson, 28, posted a message on his blog, Freelance Genius, Dec. 23 that described how he set up a movie rental account for MSNBC host Tucker Carlson at the MacArthur Boulevard store the day before. “I could tell you what […]
For some time, many people have been wrongly placed on the airline no fly list or extra screening list. I blogged about some accounts of this here and here. Now, according to the AP, the TSA will finally try to clean up its lists: The Bush administration is checking the accuracy of a watch list of suspected […]