By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 11:41am
I recently wrote about how difficult it is to know which technologies on the horizon will turn into genuine privacy nightmares and which remain menacing but distant threats. One group of technologies that we’ve had our eyes on for a while are those that purport to read minds. On Sunday the Washington Post ran an article on a Maryland case where a murder defendant is trying to introduce fMRI “lie detector” evidence in his defense. Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) allows researchers to look at neural activity in real-time by using powerful magnets to trace blood-flow changes in the brain.
Just this week, Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley signed into law the first bill in the nation prohibiting employers from requiring or requesting employees or job applicants to disclose their user names or passwords or any other means of accessing personal internet sites as a condition of employment.
It all started last year when Robert Collins came to the ACLU of Maryland still angry about the invasion of his privacy that he had to endure to get a job. He had been forced to give his Facebook password to his past employer, the Maryland Department of Corrections, when he reapplied for his job after a leave of absence to deal with a the loss of a family member. While being interviewed, he was forced to turn over the password to his personal social media account and sat mortified as his interviewer logged onto his account and told him that he was looking through all his personal messages, wall postings, and family photos. ACLU-MD took the case up and tried to resolve the issue with the Department but was not satisfied with the response. Fortunately for Maryland job seekers and employees, they will no longer have to make the difficult decision to choose between their privacy and a job. .
By Chris Conley, Technology and Civil Liberties Fellow, ACLU of Northern California at 11:15am
On Thursday California Governor Jerry Brown signed two bills into law that will protect the privacy of employee and college student social media accounts in the state of California. While these bills aren’t perfect, they are an important first step towards recognizing that our rights—including our fundamental right to privacy—apply just as much in the online world as in the offline.
By Chris Calabrese, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 6:06pm
Today Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Representative Martin Heinrich (D-NM) and a number of cosponsors filed the Password Protection Act of 2012 in the Senate and House to prevent employers from strong-arming employers and job applicants into sharing information from their personal social networking accounts. It’s an important idea and one that we’ve been pushing for more than a year, but the bill itself doesn’t go as far as we think it should.
By Catherine Crump, Staff Attorney, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 5:02pm
Senator Charles Grassley got it right: officials at the Food and Drug Administration “have absolutely no business reading the private e-mails of their employees.”
On Sunday, the New York Times ran a lengthy story detailing how the FDA monitored the communications of its own scientists, including communications with members of Congress, lawyers and journalists. Those scientists had blown the whistle on what they believed were flawed internal procedures that led to the approval of unsafe medical imaging devices. The FDA engaged in a massive email monitoring campaign to read their communications—including their private, personal emails. The emails that the FDA collected included those of a former member of Senator Grassley’s staff, presumably because he had exchanged messages with one or more of the targeted FDA officials.
After the objections raised by the ACLU and others about this issue, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) announced that he is writing a federal bill to outlaw the practice.
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 2:35pm
NBC’s Bob Sullivan published a very nice piece of reporting Wednesday on an Equifax company called The Work Number, which collects detailed information about the paychecks of 30 percent of the U.S. workforce and then uses it for various purposes, including selling it to debt collectors and financial services firms wanting to do “risk management” of their customers.
