Category Archives: Law: Privacy

Most employers read staff's email:

MORE THAN 55 per cent of US companies snoop on their staff's private email and over 60 per cent are planning to hire more spies, according to a 2005 survey by the American Management Association and Columbus, an Ohio-based training and consulting firm The ePolicy Institute.

Generally speaking, if the staff has advance notice this is legal. (In some cases it may be legal without the notice either.)

Think about what this means for the social compact.

And be warned.

The wonderful Ian Kerr, a man who organizes one heck of conference and generally fizzes with ideas, notes that a principal in a private school in Australia has banned pupils from using iPods because he believes that “iPod-toting children were isolating themselves into a cocoon of solipsism.”

Ian comments that,

one common conception of “privacy” is as a kind of “space” that enables intellectual consumption/exploration/achievement by allowing people to be “more or less inaccessible to others, either on the spatial, psychological or informational plane.”

And, on that view, iPods generate privacy, which we should see as a good. On the other hand, Ian (who has transcended the shift-key) continues,

ever since nicholas negroponte coined the concept of the “daily me” (referring to people's growing desire for only that information & news that pertained to them individually), much attention has been paid to network technologies and their ability to isolate rather than connect people.

after years of thinking about this, i still have no firm point of view on this subject — it is interesting to note that the article on the iPod referred also to the Blog as a technology used by “ego-centric 'social minimizers'” — but i do think it is worth raising the question whether these technologies are tools of that sort, or whether their use is better understood as a symptom of deeper social ills.

As Ian suggests, the iPod can be seen as a tune-out, turn-off technology, but it can also be described “as the last resort means of achieving intellectual solitude” in “the booming, buzzing confusion of technosociety”.

Personally, having children who seem quite capable of tuning me out without any technological help whatsoever, I have some trouble getting worked up about this. And being relatively libertarian on most social issues, I think whether people choose to be communitarian or solipsistic at various times of the day is their business. What's more, just because someone chooses to tune out for even a few hours per day does not mean that this activity defines them; people are complicated and can move between moods and roles during a day, and during a life.

I have been very negligent in not linking to the draft report of the Florida Committee on Privacy and Court Records. Comments are open for two more days at the Florida Courts website.

The committee's very able Chair, Jon Mills has written a short article summarizing the issues.

If you have not done so recently, it's a good idea to visit the tracking cookie opt-out page. With a few clicks you can block cookies from Doubleclick and six other Internet tracking/marketers. Ironically, you must allow the site to set a “no thanks” cookie, so cookie blockers must be turned off to make this work.

If you use more than one browser, you'll also need to repeat the exercise for each one.

Update: Ed Bott has even better suggestions.

Two news articles on what I did yesterday, Palm Beach Post, Panel agrees on Internet access to court documents in Florida and Orlando Sentinel, Panel wants records online.

Declan McCullagh has finally fixed the RSS for his Politechbot list so I guess I'm reading it again. Here's a fascinating item originating from an email from Ethan Ackerman that I'm taking the liberty of quoting in full because it raises so many issues.

Cops covertly acquired tissue of BTK suspect's relative — from medical lab: In developments straight out of GATTACA's handshake scene, A Kansas City Star report indicates that the suspected “BTK” killer was tentatively linked to crime scene evidence by acquiring genetic material from the suspect's daughter's medical records – the tissue samples being taken without her knowledge.

http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/news/nation/11035826.htm

The article goes on to give a brief but factually accurate explanation of how a request for “medical records” is entirely within the framework of the federal medical privacy laws (HIPAA), and also gives a likely source of the tissue – a routine pap smear. The article suggests that a judge issued a secret order for the records, though the article does not state if it was a formal 4th Amendment “probable cause” warrant, or some lesser standard subpoena, or even go into whether the police were required to acquire an order under HIPAA (there are circumstances where agents can just the recordholder.)

BUT the article also doesn't raise the fact that what was apparently requested was NOT “health information” – what HIPAA protects – but actual tissue from the suspect's daughter's file samples.

I'm operating on a few words from one article here, so the facts aren't definitive, but this seems quite an interesting breach of privacy expectations, independent of how it may legally turn out.

On one hand, court-compelled physical examinations have been ruled Constitutionally sound (thus, you can be compelled to give a tissue sample, or even forcibly sampled.) On the other hand, how many American women even know labs keep pap smear samples, much less would think it reasonable that their pap smears would one day be turned over to police to tentatively connect their sons or daughters to crimes?