I’ve written an article for the September issue of Scientific American magazine called The End of Privacy? The article is available online here, with a slightly different title: Do Social Networks Bring the End of Privacy?.
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 the public’s business to know what candidates I’ve given money to and how much. Go to Moneyline CQ or Fundrace2008 or OpenSecrets.org and you can search for the campaign contributions of anyone. You can learn a person’s address, occupation, and the amounts he/she contributed and to whom.
A recent New York Times article by Brad Stone discusses a website called CriminalSearches.com, which allows you to punch in a name of a person and do a search for any criminal records about him or her. From the article:
Over at WSJ blog, Dan Slater writes about a Fair Housing Act case involving a condo association that prohibited all objects in hallways. A Jewish resident challenged the rule under the Fair Housing Act because his mezuzah was removed, claiming the rule discriminated against his religion. The 7th Circuit held for the condo association [link no longer available], concluding that the rule was “neutral with respect to religion” since it applied to all objects.
I have been following the new FISA Amendments Act of 2008, but I have refrained from chiming in, as many others have been doing terrific blogging on the issue. Of particular note:
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 the Security and Human Behavior Workshop here in Boston this week, Carnegie Mellon behavioral economist George Loewenstein previewed a soon-to-be-published research study he conducted with two colleagues.
Their findings: Our privacy principles are wobbly. We are more or less likely to open up depending on who is asking, how they ask and in what context.
The TSA, in its never-ending quest to inconvenience us without keeping us safe, has once again changed its rules on identification. According to the old rule, if you didn’t provide ID at the airport, you would be subjected to secondary screening. Now, you may be denied the right to fly entirely. According to the TSA:
I recently posted data about law professor hiring statistics per institution where teaching applicants earned their JD. Some students from schools that did not have high success percentages have expressed despair that their chances are low because of the school they graduated (or will be graduating) from.
My intent in collecting and analyzing this data was to encourage more applicants to the teaching market, not discourage them.
So why are certain schools doing so disproportionately well in placing their graduates in teaching positions? Is it all based on a school’s prestige?
Former Gawker editor Emily Gould has an interesting article in the NY Times Magazine about the perils of revealing too much information online:
At the National Law Journal, attorney Nick Akerman (Dorsey & Whitney) contends that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) indictment of Lori Drew (background about the case is here) is an appropriate interpretation of the statute: