By Daniel J. Solove
Once upon a time, there was a teacher who wanted to train people. At first, the teacher stated a list of things to do and not do. But this had little effect. The teacher was upset and started to doubt whether he could ever get through to people. But then the teacher tried a new approach – using stories. People remembered the stories, and the training started to change people’s behavior. And the teacher and everyone he taught lived happily ever after.
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 implications for online marketing, Big Data, and the Internet of Things.
At first blush, it is easy to see the case as one more divergence between how privacy is protected in the EU and US, with a European Court once again showing how much eager it is to protect privacy than an American one. But the biggest takeaway from the case is not one of divergence; it is one of convergence!
By Daniel J. Solove
When you go to the hospital, you might worry about catching a staph infection or pneumonia, but you should also worry about contracting a nasty case of medical identity theft. Most people suffer significant harm from medical ID theft, and few are completely cured. This ailment is spreading dramatically as data spurts out of healthcare organizations these days as if from a ruptured aorta.
In January of this year, an article citing U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) statistics noted that in the past 5 years, there have been roughly 120,000 reported data breaches involving HIPAA protected health information. These breaches have involved more than 31 million individuals.
By Daniel J. Solove
Does scholarship really have an impact? For a long time, naysayers have attacked scholarship, especially scholarship about law. U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts once remarked: “Pick up a copy of any law review that you see, and the first article is likely to be, you know, the influence of Immanuel Kant on evidentiary approaches in 18th Century Bulgaria, or something.” He noted that when the academy addresses legal issues at “a particularly abstract, philosophical level . . . they shouldn’t expect that it would be of any particular help or even interest to the members of the practice of the bar or judges.” Judge Harry Edwards also has attacked legal scholarship as largely irrelevant.
By Daniel J. Solove
The law regulating government surveillance and information gathering is in dire need of reform. This law, which consists of the Fourth Amendment and several statutes, was created largely in the 1970s and 1980s and has become woefully outdated. The result is that law enforcement officials and intelligence agencies can readily find ways to sidestep oversight and protections when engaging in surveillance and data collection.
By Daniel J. Solove
It seems as though every week brings news of another batch of data breaches . . . and they’re getting bigger. Target. Home Depot. Sony. Anthem. The list goes on and on.
The costs of many of these breaches are devastatingly large. And yet most data breaches are readily preventable. After reviewing more than 1,000 data breaches from 2014, the Online Trust Alliance (OTA) found that more than 90% of them could have been avoided.
By Daniel J. Solove and Paul M. Schwartz
This post is co-authored with Professor Paul M. Schwartz.
This post is part of a post series where we round up some of the interesting news and resources we’re finding.
For a PDF version of this post, and for archived issues of previous posts, click here.
By Daniel J. Solove
Recently, Anthem, one of the largest health insurance providers, suffered a massive data breach involving personal data on up to 80 million people. According to Anthem, the data breached includes “names, dates of birth, member ID/ social security numbers, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses and employment information.”
By Daniel J. Solove
I produce computer-based privacy and data security training, so I’m often in the hunt for stock photos. One of the hardest things in the world to do is to find a stock photo of a hacker that doesn’t look absolutely ridiculous.
I’ve gone through hundreds of hacker stock photos, and I’ve discovered some that are so absurdly funny that they are true classics and deserve to be celebrated in a hall of fame. So I bought some of these gems to share them with you — because if there’s any sense of justice in the universe, when so much thought, creativity, and effort goes into a stock photo, it deserves to be sold.
by Daniel J. Solove
People create some very bad passwords. In the list of the most popular passwords of 2014, all of them are terrible. Just look at the top 10:
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