PEW Internet & American Life Project has released a new report on online privacy called Digital Footprints by Mary Madde, Susannah Fox, Aaron Smith, and Jessica Vitak. The report provides some very interesting statistics.
1. People are starting to google themselves. According to the survey:Continue Reading
In this post, I’ll be responding to a few more reviews of The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet. This is the third installment (for more responses to reviews, see Part I and Part II).
I see it happening over and over again. A legislature passes a statute. A new situation arises, one that doesn’t seem to have been anticipated by the legislature at the time of passing the statute. Judges must interpret the statute, and they often make one of two arguments: (1) had the legislature anticipated the case at bar, it would have clearly addressed it by encompassing or excluding it under the statute; the court should interpret the statute with its best guess about how the legislature might have addressed the new situation had it been aware of it when it created the law; or (2) the statute must be strictly construed; if the legislature really doesn’t like how the strict application of the statute’s language applies to a particular situation, then it can change the law.
Over at the VC, Eugene Volokh has an excellent post criticizing convictions of individuals under state wiretapping laws for secretly recording their encounters with the police. He quotes Commonwealth v. Hyde, 750 N.E.2d 963 (Mass. 2001), which states:
From CNN comes yet another story about people who disclose too much information on their blogs and social network websites:
There’s a new breed of gossip website, coming to a campus near you. The site is called Juicy Campus, and it involves students posting gossip about each other at particular college campuses.
As Jessica Bennett writes at Newsweek:
I previously complained about Facebook’s Beacon and Social Ads, and last week Facebook appeared to back down (at least from Beacon) by changing its policy and having users opt-in before their activities on other websites is broadcast on their profiles. I applauded Facebook’s change of heart.
But there are more disturbing aspects of Beacon that have not been changed. According to Macworld:
The news has been buzzing lately about Facebook’s Beacon, where participating websites share personal information with Facebook. Beacon originally had a poor notice and opt-out policy, but after significant public criticism, Facebook changed to an opt-in policy. Even under the new opt-in policy, however, the participating companies are still turning data over to Facebook, and that spells potential trouble for at least one of the 40 companies in the Beacon program — Blockbuster Video.
In my book, The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet, I write about how members of the current generation — what I call “Generation Google” — are increasingly spreading gossip and rumors about their private lives online. Some people have few inhibitions, especially one woman who decided to break up with her boyfriend by posting it on Facebook.
Recently, I blogged about the tragic Megan Meier case, where the parent of a classmate of Megan’s created a fake MySpace profile and pretended to be a boy (Josh Evans) interested in Megan. When the fictitious boy suddenly dumped Megan and wrote nasty comments, Megan committed suicide. A local newspaper reported the story, which quickly caught fire in the media. The local reporter declined to identify the woman who created the fake profile, fearing vigilantism, but a woman named Sarah Wells posted the woman’s name — Lori Drew — and her address. Soon, the blogosphere was aflame in rage at Drew. Recently, the local prosecutor considered bringing charges against Drew but ultimately concluded that Drew had not committed any crime.
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