PRIVACY + SECURITY BLOG

News, Developments, and Insights

William Stuntz’s Misguided Theory of Privacy and Transparency

William Stuntz (law, Harvard) has long been advancing thoughtful provocative ideas about criminal procedure. I’ve always found Stuntz to be insightful even when I disagree (and I have disagreed with him a lot). Stuntz’s recent essay in The New Republic entitled Against Privacy and Transparency has me not just disagreeing, but doing so rather sharply.

The Datran Media Case: Information Privacy Due Diligence

Recently, New York AG Eliot Spitzer settled a case against Datran Media that could have some wide-ranging implications for information privacy law. Datran Media styles itself “a leading performance-based marketing company with Enabling Technology that connects marketers to consumers through a comprehensive set of email marketing and digital media services.” This is basically a verbose way of saying that […]

Outsourcing Our Data

A growing data privacy issue is the outsourcing of personal data. Increasingly, US companies are outsourcing data processing to other countries. Although the United States lags much of the world in data protection, our personal information is being sent overseas to many countries that lack the same level of privacy protections as the United States. […]

Georgia v. Randolph and Consent to Search One’s Home

Once upon a time, a wolf came to the home of a little pig: Wolf: “Hello, little pig, let me come in.” Pig: “No, no! Not by the hair of my chinny chin chin!” Wolf: “Well, then I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house in.” Pig’s Wife: “That won’t be necessary, Wolf, […]

A Taxonomy of Privacy

My article, A Taxonomy of Privacy, 154 U. Pa. L. Rev. 477 (2006), has recently been published. I have replaced an earlier draft of the article from over a year ago on SSRN with a copy of the final published version. This article is my attempt to provide a framework for understanding the concept of privacy. A […]

The Google Subpoena Case: A Google Victory

On Friday, Judge James Ware, a U.S. District Judge in San Jose, CA, issued a decision in Gonzales v. Google, Inc., No. CV 06-8006MISC JW (Mar. 17, 2006), the case involving a government subpoena for Google search queries. A few days before Judge Ware released his opinion, he stated that he would be ordering Google to […]

Public Records and Identity Theft

There are new details to report about the famous Hamilton County public records website. Several years ago, the clerk of courts of Hamilton County, Ohio placed a wide range of public records online. Many of the records had extensive personal information about individuals, including Social Security Numbers and home addresses. The Hamilton County website garnered […]

Even Tearing Up Your Credit Card Applications Isn’t Enough

One of the reasons why identity thieves are the luckiest criminals alive is because credit card companies make their crime really easy. This person at Cockeyed.com tried an experiment. He tore up his credit card application into little pieces, meticulously taped it back up, and then filled it out as follows: