In The Future of Reputation, I wrote about the Star Wars Kid, the teenager who made a video of himself pretending to fight with a lightsaber. The video was uploaded to the Web without his consent, and he was ridiculed around the world, his video being downloaded tens of millions of times.
For years, nobody knew what happened to him. A news article now reports:
The NY Daily News reports on rumors of a potential $750 million divorce settlement proposal in the impending divorce of Tiger Woods and Elin Nordegren:
Over at Red Tape Chronicles [link no longer available], Bob Sullivan notes that Amazon is keeping data on the passages people highlight in their Kindles:
There are few defenders of the Supreme Court Justice confirmation process. Every time it occurs, we go through a charade of hearings, where candidates are coy about their positions on most issues and talk about “neutrality” and being a mere “umpire.”
Who are they kidding? We all know that no judge is neutral or a mere umpire. We all know that the Supreme Court doesn’t divine some objectively true meaning of the Constitution or the laws it interprets. We all know that ideology has some effect on judicial decisions. And we all know that judges don’t find the law but make it.
Earlier today, I posted my thoughts about how to fix the Supreme Court nomination process, and I wrote:
My colleague at George Washington University Law School, Professor Dawn Nunziato, has recently published a provocative book about the First Amendment and the Internet — Virtual Freedom: Net Neutrality and Free Speech in the Internet Age (Stanford University Press 2009).
Her book explains that, contrary to the prevailing understanding of the Internet as a haven for free speech, our communications on the Internet today are subject to censorship and control by a host of private gatekeepers – most notably, by broadband providers. Under the prevailing negative conception of the First Amendment, these powerful private gatekeepers are not subject to the First Amendment’s mandate prohibiting censorship. Unlike real space conduits for communication – like telecommunications providers and the postal service – broadband providers are unregulated in their power to censor speech on the Internet. Dawn argues for an affirmative conception of the First Amendment, under which public and powerful private gatekeepers of Internet communications are subject to the First Amendment’s mandate to ensure the free flow of communications in the digital age.
I had a chance to ask Dawn a few questions about her new book.
One of the most frequent questions I get asked when talking about my book, The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet is what to do about the troublesome younger generation which “doesn’t seem to care about privacy.” “Those foolish kids,” some people say, “they have no concept of privacy. They just bare their whole lives on the Internet. Privacy is a generational thing, and the new generations just don’t give a damn.”
Do young people care about privacy?
People believe that privacy violations should be punished — and quite stringently. There are interesting survey results in a new report by Chris Hoofnagle, Jennifer King, Su Li, and Joseph Turow, How Different are Young Adults from Older Adults When it Comes to Information Privacy Attitudes and Policies?
The report focuses primarily on comparing the attitudes of the young with older people and concluding that there isn’t much of a divergence. I blogged about it here.
I blogged about City of Ontario v. Quon a few days ago, and I want to raise another important issue in the case, one my colleague Orin Kerr has astutely pointed out. The case is on appeal to the U.S. Supreme from the 9th Circuit: Quon v. Arch Wireless Operating Co., Inc., 529 F.3d 892 (9th Cir. 2008). The case involves whether employees at a police department have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the contents of their text message communications made from pagers while on the job. In my previous post, I addressed this issue, which involves how to interpret the city’s monitoring policy (it had a general written policy for computer use but a set of informal practices for texting that were different).
The Supreme Court will soon hear arguments in City of Ontario v. Quon, an important Fourth Amendment case involving the privacy of electronic communications in the workplace.