Jeff Jarvis has this humorous piece about the FTC vs. Santa:
FTC v. Santa
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Student Privacy in Peril: Massive Data Gathering With Inadequate Privacy and Security
In October, personal financial data — including social security numbers, loan repayment histories and bank-routing numbers – of thousands of college students was exposed on the Department of Education’s (ED) direct loan website. For seven minutes, anyone surfing the direct loan website could find personal information about students who had borrowed from the Department of Education.
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Student Privacy in Peril
Over at the Huffington Post, I have a short piece about the growing problems with student data. Here’s the opening:
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Should Teachers Be Banned from Communicating with Students Online?
Increasingly, states and school districts are struggling over how to deal with teachers who communicate with students online via social network websites. One foolish way to address the issue is via strict bans, such as a law passed in Missouri earlier this year that attempted to ban teachers from friending students on social network websites. Such laws are likely violations of the First Amendment right to freedom of speech and association, and I blogged at the Huffington Post that the law was unconstitutional. Soon thereafter, a court quickly struck down the law.
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The PII Problem: Privacy and a New Concept of Personally Identifiable Information
My article, The PII Problem: Privacy and a New Concept of Personally Identifiable Information (with Professor Paul Schwartz), is now out in print. You can download the final published version from SSRN. Here’s the abstract:
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Personal Information: The Benefits and Risks of De-Identification
On Monday, December 5th, I’ll be speaking at a Future of Privacy Forum conference entitled “Personal Information: The Benefits and Risks of De-Identification.”
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Facebook Settles with the FTC
Facebook has settled with the FTC over its change to its privacy policies back in 2009. According to the FTC complaint, as summed up by the FTC press release, Facebook engaged in a number of unfair and deceptive trade practices:
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The Usefulness of Legal Scholarship
A reader of my post about the N.Y. Times critique of legal education writes, in regard to the value of legal scholarship:
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The Relationship Between Theory and Practice
The longstanding attacks on legal scholarship all seem to assume a particular relationship between theory and practice, one that I believe is flawed. Recently, I responded to one such critique. There are others, with Justice Roberts and many other judges and practitioners claiming that legal scholarship isn’t worth their attention and isn’t useful to the practice of law.
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J.K Rowling, Defamation and Privacy Law, and the Chilling of the Media
A common argument made to justify First Amendment restrictions on privacy torts and defamation law is that legal liability will chill the media. I am generally sympathetic to these arguments, though only to a point. I think these arguments are often overblown. An interesting point of comparison is the UK, where there is a much weaker protection of free speech and much stronger defamation law. Although the UK has not embraced all of the privacy torts recognized in the United States, it has come close, recognizing a robust tort of breach of confidence. Despite the lack of a First Amendment equivalent, and the stronger legal liability for gossip and libel, the press in the UK seems anything but chilled or cowed. Consider J.K. Rowling’s recent testimony:
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