A growing data privacy issue is the outsourcing of personal data. Increasingly, US companies are outsourcing data processing to other countries. Although the United States lags much of the world in data protection, our personal information is being sent overseas to many countries that lack the same level of privacy protections as the United States. This can create risks that the data can be misused for identity theft or for fake identification. It could also create national security concerns.
Once upon a time, a wolf came to the home of a little pig:
Wolf: “Hello, little pig, let me come in.”
Pig: “No, no! Not by the hair of my chinny chin chin!”
Wolf: “Well, then I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house in.”
Pig’s Wife: “That won’t be necessary, Wolf, come in, come in.”
But it’s not yet time to rewrite the tale of the Three Little Pigs.
My article, A Taxonomy of Privacy, 154 U. Pa. L. Rev. 477 (2006), has recently been published. I have replaced an earlier draft of the article from over a year ago on SSRN with a copy of the final published version. This article is my attempt to provide a framework for understanding the concept of privacy. A diagram of my framework is above. From the abstract:
On Friday, Judge James Ware, a U.S. District Judge in San Jose, CA, issued a decision in Gonzales v. Google, Inc., No. CV 06-8006MISC JW (Mar. 17, 2006), the case involving a government subpoena for Google search queries. A few days before Judge Ware released his opinion, he stated that he would be ordering Google to turn over some information, though not everything that the government was demanding. Media reports indicated a victory for the government, as these headlines suggest: “Judge Siding With Feds Over Google Porn Subpoena” (AP) and “Google Faces Order to Give Up Records” (Boston Globe).
But Judge Ware’s written decision strikes me as much more of a victory for Google and privacy than for the government.
There are new details to report about the famous Hamilton County public records website. Several years ago, the clerk of courts of Hamilton County, Ohio placed a wide range of public records online. Many of the records had extensive personal information about individuals, including Social Security Numbers and home addresses. The Hamilton County website garnered a lot of attention. The NY Times ran a story about it in 2002 called Dirty Laundry, Online for All to See (Sept. 5, 2002) at G1, by Jennifer 8. Lee:
One of the reasons why identity thieves are the luckiest criminals alive is because credit card companies make their crime really easy. This person at Cockeyed.com tried an experiment. He tore up his credit card application into little pieces, meticulously taped it back up, and then filled it out as follows:
So you’re one of the lucky few, whose case has made it to the U.S. Supreme Court. Indeed, your odds of getting your case to the Supreme Court are no better than winning Powerball these days. Your next step: create a website. You can parlay your luck at getting chosen by the Supreme Court and become a legal celebrity.
Government surveillance and data mining programs, it seems, never die. They just get renamed. So it has been with the much maligned airline screening program, which was originally called “CAPPS II.” It was canned, and a new program was started called “Secure Flight.” Recently I blogged about Secure Flight being canned, and I predicted that it would soon be reincarnated. That hasn’t happened just yet . . . but wait . . . it will. It’s a pattern.
The Wall Street Journal today had an article about the now famous email exchange I blogged about a few days ago where Dianna Abdala, a recent law school graduate turned down a job offer from an attorney, William Korman. The article discusses the fact that in some circumstances, people who are getting notorious reputations for being particularly rude or inappropriate aren’t suffering any career damage:
The AP reports that Secure Flight, the elaborate program for using data mining to screen airline passengers, has been abandoned. Ed Felton says it best:
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