AmLaw Litigation Daily has an interesting story about a lawsuit concerning privacy, social networking, and targeted advertising. 

Remember the uproar over Facebook’s controversial Beacon ad program a couple years ago? That program notified a user’s friends when he or she bought something online. Facebook modified the program, which helped mollify some critics, but the privacy lawsuits that Beacon spawned, against Facebook and retailers, have not gone away.

Dallas County resident Cathryn Elaine Harris sued Blockbuster (though not Facebook) more than a year ago in Dallas federal district court, claiming that Blockbuster Online’s arrangement with Facebook–which caused Blockbuster customers’ movie rental choices to be automatically posted on their friends’ Facebook pages–violated the Video Privacy Protection Act, a federal statute passed in response to the public disclosure of Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork’s video rental records. Harris, who seeks class action status, is demanding $2,500 for each violation of the statute.

Her suit took a big step forward last week when Dallas federal district court judge Barbara Lynn denied Blockbuster’s motion to compel arbitration (pdf).

In a suprising 5-4 opinion (pdf) from the US Supreme Court, the justices today held in Arizona v. Gant that, “Police may search the passenger compartment of a vehicle incident to a recent occupant’s arrest only if it is reasonable to believe that the arrestee might access the vehicle at the time of the search or that the vehicle contains evidence of the offense of arrest.” The opinion is by Justice Stevens, who is joined by Justices Souter, Ginsburg and, surprisingly, Scalia and Thomas.

The New York Times summarizes the case:

On Aug. 25, 1999, Mr. Gant was arrested for driving while his license was suspended. After he was handcuffed and placed in a patrol car, officers searched Mr. Gant’s car and found cocaine in the pocket of a jacket. The trial court denied Mr. Gant’s motion to suppress the drug evidence, but the Arizona high court ruled in the defendant’s favor, reasoning that the search was not necessary for the officers’ safety or to preserve evidence.

In today’s opinion, Justice Stevens upheld the ruling in Gant’s favor: Read more »

PC Mag has a story about Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his ideas on privacy, including location data privacy. (The Electronic Frontier Foundation last month praised Google Latitude and Loopt and their approaches to protecting location privacy.)

Google CEO Eric Schmidt appeared at his alma mater, Princeton University, on Saturday to discuss the Internet and globalization, Google products that have recently made headlines, and how not to be evil. [...]

Google’s information gathering processes, and what it does with that data, has been a hot topic of conversation since the company’s inception. Schmidt pointed to Google Latitude as an example of a product that had to balance innovation and privacy.

Latitude, which was released in February, lets mobile phone users share their locations, and track friends who have opted-in to the service. Read more »

The Las Vegas Sun has an op-ed about privacy and recent revelations about the National Security Agency’s “overcollection” of domestic communications of Americans.

Although the 9/11 attacks prompted sweeping changes in national security designed to thwart future terrorist events in this country, there remains a fine line between protecting the United States from those threats and violating Americans’ individual freedoms.

That’s why it was disturbing to read Thursday in The New York Times that the National Security Agency in recent months intercepted domestic e-mail messages and phone calls from Americans on a scale that exceeded legal limits set by Congress last year, unnamed government officials said. [...]

But the Times reported that the extent, if any, to which Americans’ privacy was unlawfully violated remains unknown. [...]

Although the agency plays a crucial role in keeping the U.S. safe from terrorist attacks, it should correct wiretap problems as soon as possible rather than let them fester. The failure to take immediate corrective action creates situations where Americans are unnecessarily targeted.

There’s a free public conference tomorrow at Fordham that sounds interesting. From the Web site: 

Privacy Rights and Wrongs: Balancing Moral Priorities for the 21st Century
Sponsored by The Center for Ethics Education and The Center on Law & Information Policy

With presentations from well-known academics and experts, this multidisciplinary conference will explore a number of issues related to the topic of privacy and privacy rights, especially in light of recent technological developments and current concerns about terrorism. In addition, this conference will address the problem of defining and defending “privacy rights” within the context of varying legal, moral, and political discourses, as well as the importance of understanding the value of privacy against the backdrop of other values and concerns, such as the doing of justice, the preserving of the common good, and the maintenance and fostering of personal accountability.

Speakers and topics include:

Keynote Address: The Key to Limiting Privacy is Oversight
Amitai Etzioni
University Professor of International Affairs and Director, Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies
The George Washington University

The Philosophy of Surveillance: A Contractarian Reading
Anita L. Allen
Henry R. Silverman Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy
University of Pennsylvania

Read more »

Here’s a great story where some companies in Sweden are following the maxim, “We can’t be forced to turn the data over, if we don’t retain it.” And the companies’ actions are legal. 

The new file sharing law [in Sweden] is based on the European Union’s Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED) and allows courts to order internet operators to hand over details that identify suspected illegal file sharers. 

As such, the law enables Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to retain the IP addresses of file sharers. But ISPs also remain at liberty to destroy information about their users if they so wish. Read more »