Facebook recently announced a new advertising scheme. Instead of using celebrities to hawk products, it will use . . . you! That’s right, pictures of you and your friends will appear on Facebook ads to make products more enticing to Facebook customers. As Facebook’s website describes its new “Social Ads” program:
Category: Consumer Privacy
Posts about Consumer Privacy by Professor Daniel J. Solove for his blog at TeachPrivacy, a privacy awareness and security training company.
The Do Not Call List’s Memory Lapse
So you signed up for the federal Do Not Call List and expect not to receive any more of those annoying telemarketing calls ever again. Think again. Signing up expires after 5 years, so if you signed up back when the list first came into existence, you’ll need to sign up all over again soon. […]
Requiring Banks to Disclose Identity Theft Statistics
Kudos to my friend Chris Hoofnagle (Samuelson Clinic at Berkeley Law School) who had his paper on SSRN written about by the New York Times:
How Should Data Security Breach Notification Work?
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 […]
The Rise of Customer Blacklists
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 […]
A Guide to Lobbyist Arguments on Consumer Protection
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:
Hewlett Packard Pays for Privacy . . . and Copyright?
Hewlett Packard has agreed to pay $14.5 million to resolve a lawsuit by the California attorney general over its phone records scandal. From the New York Times:
Do No Evil and Perhaps Do Some Good: Google, Privacy, and Business Records
I just blogged about the case where the government is seeking search query records from Google. I am very pleased that Google is opposing the government’s subpoena. According to the AP article:
Government vs. Google
According to the AP: Google Inc. is rebuffing the Bush administration’s demand for a peek at what millions of people have been looking up on the Internet’s leading search engine — a request that underscores the potential for online databases to become tools for government surveillance. Mountain View-based Google has refused to comply with a White […]
Cell Phone Records For Sale
The Chicago Sun Times reports: The Chicago Police Department is warning officers their cell phone records are available to anyone — for a price. Dozens of online services are selling lists of cell phone calls, raising security concerns among law enforcement and privacy experts. . . . To test the service, the FBI paid Locatecell.com $160 to […]