Halloween is this week, so I thought I’d bring this older cartoon out of the archive. I updated it a bit. Enjoy!
Cartoon: Big Data Halloween

Posts containing Cartoons by Professor Daniel J. Solove for his blog at TeachPrivacy, a privacy awareness and security training company.
Halloween is this week, so I thought I’d bring this older cartoon out of the archive. I updated it a bit. Enjoy!
This cartoon is about profiling. A profile consists of a particular set of characteristics and behaviors that are deemed as suspicious by law enforcement. Profiles can be created by people or generated by algorithms that identify suspicious things from data of known criminals or terrorists.
Friday’s U.S. Supreme Court decision, TransUnion v. Ramirez (U.S. June 25, 2021), prompted me to release this cartoon about privacy harms that I created a while ago. In TransUnion, a group of plaintiffs sued TransUnion for falsely labeling them as potential terrorists in their credit reports. The Supreme Court held that only some plaintiffs had standing […]
This cartoon is about “data ethics,” a term for when companies make an effort to review the ethical ramifications of their activities involving personal data. I generally applaud looking at ethics broadly because it avoids being unduly constrained in its focus by narrow conceptions of privacy. But there often isn’t sufficient rigor in the analysis […]
This cartoon focuses on video recording – how people readily whip out their phones to record events involving people in distress. The “bystander effect” is often invoked to describe the phenomenon of why people watch an emergency unfold without trying to help the victim. Perhaps there should be a modern update to the “bystander effect” […]
This cartoon is about the HIPAA right to access medical records. Obtaining access to one’s medical records is currently like a scavenger hunt. Patients have to call and call again, wait seemingly forever to get records, and receive them via ancient means like mail and fax. There have been several articles (here, here, and here) […]
I created this cartoon to highlight the relationship between privacy and data security. Privacy and data security are deeply interrelated. Unfortunately, privacy is often overlooked as a key dimension of keeping data secure. Minimizing data collection and ensuring that data isn’t retained for longer than needed both improve security immensely. When there’s a data breach, […]
This cartoon is about CAPTCHAs that people click to indicate that they are not robots. CAPTCHA is an acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart. Online, there is a scrum to gather and use data, a race to automate nearly everything, an invasion of good bots and bad bots […]
Here are some of highlights of my privacy training, writing, resources, and humor from 2020.
This cartoon is about de-identifying PHI under HIPAA. De-identifying personal data is quite complicated. Researchers have been able to re-identify sets of personal data with just names, birth dates, and gender. The reason why de-identifying data is difficult is that there is more and more identified personal data online that can be matched up […]