Tag: Privacy
-
The case of Prof. Cronon and the FOIA requests for his private emails
Prof. William Cronon, from the University of Wisconsin, started a blog, Scholar as Citizen, wherein he critiqued Republican policies in the State of Wisconsin and elsewhere. I’m going to skip the politics and focus on the fact that the Republicans used Wisconsin’s FOIA mechanism to ask for a wide variety of his emails and they’re…
-
Do corporations have a "personal privacy" right?
Today, the Supreme Court released its unanimous opinion in Federal Communications Commission v. AT&T Inc., No. 09-1279 (U.S. Mar. 1, 2011) At issue was the question, “Does a corporation have a “personal privacy” right under the Freedom of Information Act?” In this decision, the United States Supreme Court said “no.” The decision was 8-0 with…
-
What are the Constitutional Limits on Online Tracking Regulations?
As the conceptual contours of Do Not Track are being worked out, an interesting question to consider is whether such a regulation—if promulgated—would survive a First Amendment challenge. Could Do Not Track be an unconstitutional restriction on the commercial speech of online tracking entities? The answer would of course depend on what restrictions a potential…
-
Things overheard on the WiFi from my Android smartphone
Today in my undergraduate security class, we set up a sniffer so we could run Wireshark and Mallory to listen in on my Android smartphone. This blog piece summarizes what we found. Google properly encrypts traffic to Gmail and Google Voice, but they don’t encrypt traffic to Google Calendar. An eavesdropper can definitely see your…
-
Brazilian Communications Agency Moves Towards Surveillance Superpowers
January is the month when the Brazilian version of the popular TV show Big Brother returns to the air. For three months, a bunch of people are locked inside a house and their lives are broadcast 24/7. A TV show premised on nonstop surveillance might sound like fun to some people, but it is disturbing…
-
If Wikileaks Scraped P2P Networks for "Leaks," Did it Break Federal Criminal Law?
On Bloomberg.com today, Michael Riley reports that some of the documents hosted at Wikileaks may not be “leaks” at all, at least not in the traditional sense of the word. Instead, according to a computer security firm called Tiversa, “computers in Sweden” have been searching the files shared on p2p networks like Limewire for sensitive…
-
Some Technical Clarifications About Do Not Track
When I last wrote here about Do Not Track in August, there were just a few rumblings about the possibility of a Do Not Track mechanism for online privacy. Fast forward four months, and Do Not Track has shot to the top of the privacy agenda among regulators in Washington. The FTC staff privacy report…
-
Monitoring all the electrical and hydraulic appliances in your house
Dan Wallach recently wrote about his smart electric meter, which keeps track of the second-by-second current draw of his whole house. But what he might like to know is, exactly what appliance is on at what time? How could you measure that? You might think that one would have to instrument each different circuit at…
-
Court Rules Email Protected by Fourth Amendment
Today, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled that the contents of the messages in an email inbox hosted on a provider’s servers are protected by the Fourth Amendment, even though the messages are accessible to an email provider. As the court puts it, “[t]he government may not compel a commercial…
-
On Facebook Apps Leaking User Identities
The Wall Street Journal today reports that many Facebook applications are handing over user information—specifically, Facebook IDs—to online advertisers. Since a Facebook ID can easily be linked to a user’s real name, third party advertisers and their downstream partners can learn the names of people who load their advertisement from those leaky apps. This reportedly…