PRIVACY + SECURITY BLOG

News, Developments, and Insights

high-tech technology background with eyes on computer display

NSA Surveillance: Having a Laugh at the Expense of Your Privacy

NSA Surveillance

ABC News reports about a new scandal arising out of the NSA Surveillance Program: Despite pledges by President George W. Bush and American intelligence officials to the contrary, hundreds of US citizens overseas have been eavesdropped on as they called friends and family back home, according to two former military intercept operators who worked at […]

Facebook, Myspace, and College Admissions

College Admissions and Social Media Profiles

Last year, I noted that employers and others were increasingly looking at applicants’ social network website profile pages in their hiring decisions. Apparently, now college admissions officers are also using social network sites like Facebook and MySpace to make decisions on applicants. According to the Wall St. Journal:

The Privacy Paradox

Privacy Paradox

Over at the New York Times’s Bits blog, Brad Stone writes: Researchers call this the privacy paradox: normally sane people have inconsistent and contradictory impulses and opinions when it comes to their safeguarding their own private information. Now some new research is beginning to document and quantify the privacy paradox. In a talk presented at […]

Franz Kafka’s Last Wishes and the Kafka Myths

Franz Kafka

Professor Lior Strahilevitz (U. Chicago Law School) has an interesting post about Franz Kafka’s papers. The famous story about Kafka’s papers is that Kafka asked his friend, Max Brod, to burn them after his death. Although Kafka had published a few works during his lifetime, a great many stories, parables, letters, and diary entries were […]

Fallacies About Privacy

Privacy

In today’s Wall Street Journal, Gordon Crovitz has an op-ed arguing that we’ve gotten over privacy: We seem to be following the advice of Scott McNealy, chairman of Sun Microsystems, who in 1999 said, “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.” And the observation by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison: “The privacy you’re concerned about […]

Should People’s Political Donations Be Public?

Privacy of Political Donations

Pursuant to the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA), people’s campaign contributions must be accessible to the public. I’ve long found this to be problematic when applied to the campaign contributions of individuals. Certainly, information must be reported to the government to ensure that campaign contribution limits aren’t exceeded. But I don’t know why it is […]