Disclosure: I have both disagreed and agreed with various Google actions over the last few years.

Saul Hansell over at NY Times’ Bits blog reports:

Google’s massive reservoir of data about online behavior, gathered by tracking hundreds of millions of computers, is like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. It is a resource that might or might not be exploited safely, and there certainly should be a robust debate before the drilling starts.

Google assigns every computer that visits its sites a unique identifying number — known as a cookie — and records searches and other activities in an unimaginably large file along with those cookies. The company has maintained that it hasn’t used any of that information to draw inferences about users to target ads.

Until now. (more…)

Found via the EPIC Alert.

University of Pennsylvania law professor and privacy expert Anita L. Allen reviews the NAACP v. Alabama case, which concerns the right to privacy in your associations. The ruling turns 50 on today, June 30. Allen writes:

The United States Supreme Court’s decision in NAACP v. Alabama ex. Rel. Patterson, 357 U.S. 449 (1958) turns 50 this year. For those who value privacy it is a birthday worth remembering.

In NAACP v. Alabama, the Court affirmed that the constitutional rights of speech and assembly include a right of private group association. The idea that Americans are free to join private groups was not new in 1958. However, the Court’s decision to allow private groups to keep membership information confidential was an important constitutional milestone.

In 1956, the state of Alabama demanded a copy of the NAACP’s membership list, as part of its effort to expel the group from the state for allegedly violating a state business law. But the Supreme Court held that the civil rights group had a right to keep its members’ identities secret, whether or not a technical business law had been broken. Revealing the group’s membership, argued the Court, “is likely to affect adversely the ability of [the NAACP] and its members to pursue their collective effort to foster beliefs which they admittedly have the right to advocate, in that it may induce members to withdraw from the Association and dissuade others from joining it because of fear of exposure of their beliefs shown through their associations and of the consequences of this exposure.” NAACP at 462-63. (more…)

"On Tuesday, July 1, ACS will host a panel discussion at the National Press Club examining the current Supreme Court Term. In the immediate wake of the Term’s conclusion, leading experts representing both progressive and conservative perspectives will discuss the Court’s most noteworthy decisions and identify emerging trends.

The panel will feature:

* Randy E. Barnett, Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Legal Theory, Georgetown University Law Center

* Thomas C. Goldstein, Partner, Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, LLP; Lecturer in Law, Supreme Court Litigation Clinic, Harvard Law School and Stanford Law School

* Alan B. Morrison, Special Counsel, Fair Elections Legal Network; Co-Founder and Former Director, Public Citizen Litigation Group

* John Payton, President and Director-Counsel, NAACP Legal Defense Fund

* Deborah Pearlstein, LAPA Visiting Scholar, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University

* Andrew J. Pincus, Partner, Mayer Brown LLP; Visiting Lecturer in Law, Yale Law School

* Moderator, Kathleen M. Sullivan, Partner, Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges, LLP; Stanley Morrison Professor of Law and former Dean, Stanford Law School"

Date: July 1, 2008 at 9 am
Location: National Press Club Ballroom; 529 14th Street NW, 13th Floor; Washington, DC
For more information: http://www.acslaw.org/node/6732

The New York Times reports:

The United States and the European Union are nearing completion of an agreement allowing law enforcement and security agencies to obtain private information — like credit card transactions, travel histories and Internet browsing habits — about people on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.

The potential agreement, as outlined in an internal report obtained by The New York Times, would represent a diplomatic breakthrough for American counterterrorism officials, who have clashed with the European Union over demands for personal data. Europe generally has more stringent laws restricting how governments and businesses can collect and transfer such information.

[...]

“I am very worried that once this will be adopted, it will serve as a pretext to freely share our personal data with anyone, so I want it to be very clear about exactly what it means and how it will work,” said Sophia in ’t Veld, a member of the European Parliament from the Netherlands who has been an outspoken advocate of privacy rights.

A personal note: This is the 100th post on Privacy Lives.

The New York Times has an interesting story on something most people do everyday — send a personal e-mail from a Web-based account on a company computer.

When he was fired, Scott Sidell was angry enough. Then he found out that his former employer was reading his personal Yahoo e-mail messages, after he had left the company.

Scott Sidell is suing his former employer, Structured Settlement Investments, saying it read his personal e-mail messages after he left.

In a lawsuit that he filed in May against Structured Settlement Investments, the finance company he used to run, Mr. Sidell claims that executives at the company went so far as to read e-mail messages that he had sent to his lawyers discussing his strategy for winning an arbitration claim over his lost job.

As the New York Times points out, this is a confusing area of law. “Generally, courts have found that employers can monitor employees’ e-mail communications on company computers. But courts have also recognized greater privacy protection for e-mail messages sent using personal, Web-based e-mail accounts.”

With people using Blackberries on vacations, Skyping from home to attend a conference call, or even calling family members from the office phone, there’s a continual blurring of the personal and professional. Recently, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on a case concerning personal text messages sent on government-issued pagers. More questions will continue to be raised as technology progresses. 

Disclosure: I have worked with Bruce Schneier on a variety of issues, including camera surveillance.

Security expert Bruce Schneier has an interesting column in the Guardian UK: CCTV doesn’t keep us safe, yet the cameras are everywhere. Schneier writes:

Overall, CCTV cameras aren’t very effective.

This fact has been demonstrated again and again: by a comprehensive study for the Home Office in 2005, by several studies in the US, and again with new data announced last month by New Scotland Yard. They actually solve very few crimes, and their deterrent effect is minimal.

He goes on to explain how cameras create a false sense of security. (more…)