A reporter for the Daily Mirror in the United Kingdom filed requests for data under the country’s freedom of information laws to 46 organizations and received a mountain of data. The organizations “included Government agencies, schools and universities, hospitals, dentists and GP surgeries and firms [the reporter] used.” He said, “Stacked over two feet high and weighing 12kg (nearly two stone), this pile of more than 3,000 sheets of paper contains every private detail of my life in my 35 years on the planet.”

He was amazed by the amount of personal information that was gathered and “stored on dozens of databases around the country which can be accessed by thousands of people”:

In it you’ll discover what I buy at the supermarket, what type of movies I like to watch and what music I’ve downloaded. Read more »

At ZDNet, Matthew Miller looks into the privacy policies of Palm, Apple and RIM (which produces BlackBerrys).

I found and reviewed the privacy information for RIM and Apple too and found that Palm’s WebOS privacy document is overly personal compared to these other two companies. Windows Mobile is too difficult to find this type of information for since Microsoft makes the OS, but several different companies make the devices and terms and conditions vary by carrier and manufacturer while RIM, Apple, and Palm all develop and make their own line of products. [...]

However, if you look at paragraph 2 of their privacy notice you will see [Palm] can actually share your personal information with Palm affiliates and subsidiaries to support sales and marketing. [...] Read more »

Forbes reports on new encryption technology from IBM, which the company says will improve privacy and security for users. It would allow computers to analyze encrypted data (for example, to filter e-mail spam) without seeing any of the private information.

The premise of what computer scientists call “fully homomorphic encryption,” like many long-unsolved mathematical puzzles, sounds both simple and impossible: Can data be encrypted in a way that allows any calculation to be performed on the scrambled information without unscrambling it?

Imagine online accounting software that takes in encrypted data about your salary and expenditures, crunches the numbers and spits out an encrypted tax filing ready to be decrypted and sent to the IRS. The accounting software would never know the contents of what it had analyzed, and you might be less fretful about sending sensitive financial data to that online tax service. [...] Read more »

The New Jersey Law Journal reports on a case in the state involving online privacy.

A federal jury in Newark, N.J., on Tuesday found that restaurant managers who surreptiously monitoring employees’ postings in a MySpace gripe group violated state and federal laws that protect privacy of Web communications.

Two servers at Houston’s in Hackensack, fired for criticizing their bosses in those May 2006 postings, were awarded a total of $3,400 in back pay and $13,600 in punitive damages in the case, Pietrylo v. Hillstone Restaurant Group, 2:06-cv-5754.

The jury found that the restaurant violated the Federal Stored Communications Act and the New Jersey Wiretapping and Electronic Surveillance Control Act, and that management acted maliciously.

The Christian Science Monitor reports on a change in the privacy of Facebook updates.

Word of caution: Those Facebook status updates you’re posting may soon be available to the public by default.

But don’t worry just yet.

Users who have set their profile privacy options to be viewed by “everyone,” are the only ones whose status will be immediately available to the public. At least for now.

Yesterday, Facebook wrote a blog post announcing it has started testing a new beta version of its updated program “Publisher,” which gives users the option to make Facebook status updates public or not – though the default setting is public.

In an 8-1 decision, US Supreme Court has held (pdf) that a strip search of a 13-year-old girl by Arizona school officials who were looking for drugs was illegal. Justice Souter wrote the majority opinion in Safford United School District #1 v. Redding (08-479), and Justice Thomas was the lone dissenter.

The school officials searched Savana because another student, who had been caught with ibuprofen, had accused Savana of giving her the pills. The court held that the search of Savana’s backpack and outer clothing for drugs was legal, but it was not legal to require her “to pull her bra out and to the side and shake it, and to pull out the elastic on her underpants, thus exposing her breasts and pelvic area to some degree.” Justice Souter wrote, “The meaning of such a search, and the degradation its subject may reasonably feel, place a search that intrusive in a category of its own demanding its own specific suspicions.” Read more »