PRIVACY + SECURITY BLOG

News, Developments, and Insights

high-tech technology background with eyes on computer display

Lori Drew and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act

Daniel Solove     @daniel-solove.bsky.social
Founder of TeachPrivacy
November 16, 2008

Lori Drew Megan Meier Case

The Lori Drew trial is set to begin this week, and it is a travesty that this trial is even taking place. The basic facts of this case are that Drew was the mother of a teenage daughter and she created a fake MySpace profile for a fictional teen boy to befriend a classmate of her daughter’s. It remains unclear what the motivation was for creating this fake profile, but from what I’ve read, it was to learn about rumors about her daughter. This classmate, Megan Meier, befriended the fake MySpace persona. At some point, the fake persona broke up with Meier, saying he no longer wanted to be friends, and Meier committed suicide.

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

Daniel Solove     @daniel-solove.bsky.social
Founder of TeachPrivacy
October 9, 2008

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 the giant National Security Agency (NSA) center in Fort Gordon, Georgia.

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The Future of Academic Presses

Daniel Solove     @daniel-solove.bsky.social
Founder of TeachPrivacy
September 18, 2008

Books

Academic presses are facing a difficult future. Book publishing in general is an industry that is struggling, and academic presses have it especially hard since many titles they publish will not have mass popular appeal. Unfortunately, many academic presses are no longer subsidized by their universities, including very wealthy schools like Harvard and Yale, which are greedily hoarding the money in their big endowments. As a result, academic presses must find ways to be profitable, which can be difficult with books that aren’t written by Malcolm Gladwell or Stephen Colbert.

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Facebook, Myspace, and College Admissions

Daniel Solove     @daniel-solove.bsky.social
Founder of TeachPrivacy
September 18, 2008

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:

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Politics in the Age of MySpace and Facebook

Daniel Solove     @daniel-solove.bsky.social
Founder of TeachPrivacy
September 3, 2008

Facebook MySpace

Recently, I was interviewed for an article in the Globe and Mail about the young teenage father-to-be involved in the media circus surrounding vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s pregnant teenage daughter. I believe that the media should restrain itself from prying further into Palin’s daughter’s private life, as well as that of the father-to-be. He was referred to only as “Levi” by the media until recently, when a few media entities and bloggers started identifying him by his full name. I don’t believe he should be identified by his last name unless he consents to it. His identity is of little relevance to the issues in the campaign.

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Franz Kafka’s Last Wishes and the Kafka Myths

Daniel Solove     @daniel-solove.bsky.social
Founder of TeachPrivacy
September 2, 2008

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 unpublished, as were Kafka’s two great book masterpieces, The Trial and The Castle. Brod refused to burn them. Instead, he published them, and Kafka would go on to achieve enormous posthumous fame as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century.

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Fallacies About Privacy

Daniel Solove     @daniel-solove.bsky.social
Founder of TeachPrivacy
August 25, 2008

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 is largely an illusion. All you have to give up is your illusions, not any of your privacy.”

These comments could be dismissed as technology executives trying to minimize complaints about technology. But whatever we say about how much we value privacy, a close look at our actual behavior suggests we have gotten over it. A recent study by AOL of privacy in Britain found that 84% of people said they would not disclose details about their income online, but in fact 89% of them willingly did.

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