By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 3:02pm
Adam Thierer of the libertarian Mercatus Center posted a thoughtful critique of my recent piece on online tracking and consumer “choice.” I wrote about a new paper on behavioral advertising and how it “demonstrates the absurdity of the position that individuals who desire privacy must attempt to win a technological arms race with the multi-billion dollar internet-advertising industry.”
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 7:45am
A group of privacy researchers (including some responsible for the excellent privacy studies done by the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology) have an interesting paper out this week in the Harvard Law & Policy Review on behavioral advertising. In the paper, the authors (Chris Jay Hoofnagle, Ashkan Soltani, Nathaniel Good, Dietrich J. Wambach, and Mika D. Ayenson) argue against the idea that privacy-protecting regulations somehow take choice away from consumers who are grown-up enough to fend for themselves. Such arguments are currently being thrown around in an attempt to forestall Do Not Track from being implemented (as I discussed here).
By Aden Fine, Senior Staff Attorney, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 12:44pm
Twitter just filed its brief appealing a June decision by a New York criminal court judge requiring the company to give the Manhattan District Attorney detailed information on the communications of Twitter user Malcolm Harris, an Occupy Wall Street protester charged with disorderly conduct in connection with a march on the Brooklyn Bridge.
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 3:38pm
One of the biggest problems with protecting privacy in the United States is that, almost alone in the advanced-industrial world, we do not have an overarching privacy law that codifies the basic privacy principles that are accepted around the world as the gold standard for protecting this human right.
Instead, the United States pursues a sector-by-sector approach to privacy. The result is that our privacy protections vary wildly according to area. We have some (inadequate) protections for our health and financial data, very few protections for our commercial transactions, and very rigorous protections for our video rental records.
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 3:18pm
British Airways made headlines in Britain last week with reports that it is planning to do internet searches on customers in order to provide them with a “personal touch.” As a BA spokesperson explained,
We’re essentially trying to recreate the feeling of recognition you get in a favourite restaurant when you’re welcomed there, but in our case it will be delivered by thousands of staff to millions of customers. This is just the start—the system has a myriad of possibilities for the future.
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 2:36pm
Ron and Rand Paul’s manifesto on “The Technology Revolution,” released the other day, is unexpectedly incomplete, focusing most of its animus not on government security and police agencies, but on what they call “collectivists,” by which they mean those who advance attempts to “regulate competition, infrastructure, privacy and intellectual property.” I think they mean us.
By Aden Fine, Senior Staff Attorney, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 2:07pm
A New York criminal court judge has issued a decision denying Twitter’s motion to quash a court order requiring it to produce information about one of its users pursuant to a subpoena that the District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan issued in connection with the prosecution of an Occupy Wall Street protester.
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 4:20pm
I lost my credit card yesterday and had a very telling experience on the phone with American Express trying to get it replaced. After I gave them various pieces of information, the customer service agent said they would ship me a new card to the billing address on file. Just when I thought I was done, she then read something to the effect of, “For security purposes, I am going to ask you a question. The information this question is based on is not connected to your account, but was obtained from third-party information services.”
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 9:28am
Tuesday I posted about the controversy over Do Not Track and the advertising industry’s objections to pro-privacy default settings. One thing I didn’t comment on was that the Interactive Advertising Bureau trotted out the usual argument against any steps to prevent the full force and fury of modern American capitalism from figuring out how to spy on us most thoroughly:
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 12:10pm
Microsoft’s welcome announcement that it plans to leave a “Do Not Track” flag turned on by default for its users has been very revealing in a number of respects. It also risks distracting from more important issues in the debate over commercial online surveillance.
