Tag: Privacy
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Utah Anti-Spyware Bill Becomes Law
Ben Edelman reports that Utah’s governor signed HB323 into law yesterday. That’s the anti-spyware law I discussed two weeks ago. I guess we’ll find out whether the bill’s opponents were right about its supposed burden on legitimate software businesses.
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Shielding P2P Users' Identities
New P2P technologies are more effectively shielding the identities and net addresses of their users, according to a John Borland story at news.com. This is not surprising given that the past generation of P2P systems did essentially nothing to hide their users’ addresses. Agents of the RIAA exploited that lack of protection to identify people…
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How To Annoy Your Mother-in-Law
Look up her age here. Then send her an email informing her that anyone on the Net can do the same. UPDATE (9:00 PM): How to run up your mother-in-law’s AOL bill: tell her she can look up her friends’ ages.
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Privacy, Blogging, and Conflict of Interest
Blogging can create the most interesting conflicts of interest. Here is a particularly juicy example: William Safire’s column in today’s New York Times questions the motives of the new LifeLog program at DARPA. (DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is the part of the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) that funds external research and…
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NRC Report on Authentication Technology and Privacy
The authoritative National Research Council has issued an important new report entitled “Who Goes There?: Authentication Through the Lens of Privacy.” Like all NRC reports, this is an in-depth document reflecting the consensus of an impressive panel of experts. Often people think of authorization (that is, ensuring that only authorized people get access to a…
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"Accidental Privacy Spills"
Don’t miss James Grimmelmann’s essay of that title over at LawMeme. The essay tells the story of how an email that journalist Laurie Garrett sent to a few friends leaked out gradually onto the Internet, and reflects on the implications of this kind of leak.
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Privacy Technology vs. Privacy Laws
Politech reprints an anonymous, somewhat overheated essay arguing for a technology-only approach to privacy, as opposed to one based on laws. It’s easy to dismiss an essay like this just because of its obnoxious tone. But we should be skeptical of its ideas too. Certainly, we ought to use privacy-enhancing technology when it is available,…
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Tech Provisions in Homeland Security Bill
Orin Kerr, over at the Volokh Conspiracy, summarizes some tech-related provisions in the new Homeland Security bill. The bill changes the sentences that can be assessed for some computer crimes. The effect of these changes is unclear but will likely be small. The widely discussed life-sentence-for-hacking provision applies only in cases when the crimes deliberately…
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Wireless Tracking of Everything
Arnold Kling at The Bottom Line points to upcoming technologies that allow the attachment of tiny tags, which can be tracked wirelessly, to almost anything. He writes: In my view, which owes much to David Brin, we should be encouraging the use of [these tags], while making sure that no single agency or elite has…