In another European case I’ve blogged about before (here, here, and here), yesterday an Italian court convicted three Google executives of criminal privacy violations in a case arising out of a 2006 YouTube video of the bullying of an autistic boy, posted to YouTube by his abusers. The court imposed suspended three- to six-month sentences on [...]
Vancouver property owners and an arbor service have been charged with illegal removal of trees from the owner’s property. A Vancouver bylaw requires property owners receive a permit to remove trees greater than 20 cm in diameter, and the owners have been charged with the unpermitted removal of over 20 trees. The penalty for each [...]
Starting this summer, when our clickstream data and demographic profile trigger delivery of online ads, the ad will contain a little blue <i> icon, perhaps words such as “Why did I get this ad?,” and a link to a site explaining how the advertiser uses the collected data. Advertisers agreed to the new policy hoping [...]
Slate–the online magazine, not the trendy New York Manhattan dry-cleaning company started by a former student–ran an article by Dahlia Lithwick about Justice Scalia’s statement that he would vote to reverse New York Times v Sullivan if given the chance. This 1964 Supreme Court decision imposed the requirement that public officials who sue for defamation [...]
I’m having great fun doing a directed study this semester on privacy law. Today the student emailed, saying she was torn between two deeply-held principles: the First Amendment protects our right to receive all the information we need to make informed choices, without screening or censoring, and our natural right to privacy and human dignity [...]
Metadata is “data about data” or “information about other information.” Web pages contain metadata–click on “view page source” or the equivalent command in your browser to see all of the behind-the-scenes code that goes into this seemingly plain, boringly-white page. The typewritten papers and memos of my college and law school careers contained no metadata [...]
Tomorrow I start teaching a half-semester seminar on privacy law in the honors program. Here’s Bruce Schneier with a timely piece about data, “the natural by-product of every computer mediated interaction. It stays around forever, unless it’s disposed of. It is valuable when reused, but it must be done carefully. Otherwise, its after-effects are toxic.” [...]