William Stuntz (law, Harvard) has long been advancing thoughtful provocative ideas about criminal procedure. I’ve always found Stuntz to be insightful even when I disagree (and I have disagreed with him a lot). Stuntz’s recent essay in The New Republic entitled Against Privacy and Transparency has me not just disagreeing, but doing so rather sharply.
Recently, New York AG Eliot Spitzer settled a case against Datran Media that could have some wide-ranging implications for information privacy law. Datran Media styles itself “a leading performance-based marketing company with Enabling Technology that connects marketers to consumers through a comprehensive set of email marketing and digital media services.” This is basically a verbose way of saying that it sends unsolicited email, which is perhaps a kind way of describing spam.
Datran obtained personal information from other companies which violated their privacy policies in selling the data to Datran. According to the AP:
When it comes to surveillance for the Bush information, it appears that only the sky’s the limit. From the Washington Post [link no longer available]:
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.
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:
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:
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.