PRIVACY + SECURITY BLOG

News, Developments, and Insights

high-tech technology background with eyes on computer display

HIPAA’s Friends and Family Network: Access to Health Information

by Daniel J. Solove Suppose your elderly mother is being treated at the hospital for a heart condition. Your mother tells her doctor that you can have access to her health information. The doctor, however, doesn’t disclose the information to you. The doctor thinks that you can only have the information with a signed written […]

Baseball’s “Hacking” Case: Are You a Hacker Too?

By Daniel J. Solove   I’m a St. Louis Cardinals fan, so I guess it is fitting that my favorite team becomes embroiled in a big privacy and data security incident.  At the outset, apologies for the feature photo above.  It pulled up under a search for “baseball hacker,” and as a collector of ridiculous […]

Law Firm Cyber Security and Privacy Risks

law firm data security

By Daniel J. Solove Law firms are facing grave privacy and security risks. Although a number of firms are taking steps to address these risks, the industry as a whole needs to grasp the severity of the risk. For firms, privacy and security risks can be significantly higher than for other organizations. Incidents can be […]

Privacy Law: From a National Dish to a Global Stew

By Daniel J. Solove This post is co-authored by Professor Neil Richards The recent case of Google v. Vidal-Hall in the UK has generated quite a buzz, with Omer Tene calling it the “European privacy judicial decision of a decade.” The case illustrates several fascinating aspects of the developing global law of privacy, with big […]

Ebola and Privacy: Snooping, Confidentiality, and HIPAA

by Daniel J. Solove The recent cases of Ebola in the United States demonstrate challenges to health privacy in today’s information age — both in preventing employees from snooping into patient information as well as preventing the disclosure of patient identities.

Unmasking a Judge’s Anonymity: Saffold v. Plain Dealer Publishing Co.

Mask

In a very interesting case, Saffold v. Plain Dealer Publishing Co., a state court judge (Shirley Strickland Saffold) is suing the Cleveland Plan Dealer for stating that comments posted on the newspaper’s website under the screen name “lawmiss” originated from a computer used by the judge and/or her daughter.  Some of these comments related to […]

Rethinking Free Speech and Civil Liability

Free Speech and Civil Liability

When does civil liability for speech trigger First Amendment protections? Recently, Professor Neil Richards and I posted on SSRN our new article exploring this question: Rethinking Free Speech and Civil Liability, 109 Columbia Law Review (forthcoming 2009).

A-Rod, Rihanna, and Confidentiality

Confidentiality

Over at Emergent Chaos, Adam Shostack raises an interesting issue regarding Alex Rodriguez (A-Rod) and confidentiality. According to the rules in place about the baseball steroid testing back in 2003, the results of these tests were supposed to be confidential. According to Gregg Doyel at CBS: