On Sunday, May 19 at 7 p.m. ET and PT, “60 Minutes” will have include a segment, “A Face in the Crowd,” on the issue of privacy and facial-recognition technology. Here’s what “60 Minutes” says:

The odds are you are not just a face in the crowd any longer. Even if your picture isn’t plastered all over social networking and photo-sharing sites, facial recognition technology in public places is making it harder if not impossible to remain anonymous. Lesley Stahl reports on the new ways this technology is being used that even has one of its inventors calling it too intrusive. Her 60 MINUTES report will be broadcast Sunday, May 19 (7:00-8:00 PM, ET/PT) on the CBS Television Network.

Professor Alessandro Acquisti of Carnegie Mellon, who researches how technology impacts privacy, stunned Stahl with an experiment. He photographed random students on the campus and in short order, not only identified several of them, but in a number of cases found their personal information, including social security numbers, just using a facial recognition program he downloaded for free. Read more »

Bloomberg News reports that hospitals are looking to biometric technology, including iris scans, as a defense against security breaches and medical identity theft:

Clinics and hospitals around the world are acquiring technology that identifies people based on physical traits to improve patient safety and stamp out fraud. HCA Holdings Inc. (HCA) hospitals in London, as well as health-care providers across the U.S., are buying so-called biometric technologies.

Biometrics makers, such as Safran SA (SAF), Fujitsu Ltd. (6702) and closely held AOptix Technologies Inc. and M2Sys Technology, say demand from health-care providers is growing. While ensuring the right person gets the right treatment is the main reason for buying biometrics, hospitals and patients see another benefit: reducing the risk of data breaches that can lead to identity theft. [...]

Identify theft is leaving hospitals with unpaid bills and consumers on the hook for costly treatment they didn’t receive. Data breaches, which include lost and stolen information, may cost the health-care industry in the U.S. as much as $7 billion a year, according to a survey conducted by the Ponemon Institute, a Traverse City, Michigan-based organization that studies privacy, data protection and security. Read more »

The New York Times discusses online privacy with Carnegie Mellon University’s Alessandro Acquisti, who has co-authored a draft paper, “Sleights of Privacy: Framing, Disclosures, and the Limits of Transparency” (pdf), on the issue.

Alessandro Acquisti, a behavioral economist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, studies how we make these choices [related to online terms of service]. In a series of provocative experiments, he has shown that despite how much we say we value our privacy — and we do, again and again — we tend to act inconsistently.

Mr. Acquisti is something of a pioneer in this emerging field of research. His experiments can take time. The last one, revealing how Facebook users had tightened their privacy settings, took seven years. They can also be imaginative: he has been known to dispatch graduate students to a suburban mall in the name of science. And they are often unsettling: A 2011 study showed that it was possible to deduce portions of a person’s Social Security number from nothing but a photograph posted online. He is now studying how online social networks can enable employers to illegally discriminate in hiring. [...]

Those who follow his work say it has important policy implications as regulators in Washington, Brussels and elsewhere scrutinize the ways that companies leverage the personal data they collect from users. The Federal Trade Commission last year settled with Facebook, resolving charges that it had deceived users with changes to its privacy settings. State regulators recently fined Google for harvesting e-mails and passwords of unsuspecting users during its Street View mapping project. Last year, the White House proposed a privacy bill of rights to give consumers greater control over how their personal data is used. [...] Read more »

A couple of years ago, when Rebecca Skloot published a book about the fascinating story of Henrietta Lacks, her cervical cancer and what researchers did with it, news articles raised questions about the privacy of a person’s medical data and what rights a person has to their own tissue. Now, Skloot updates the story in an opinion column for the New York Times — and, now, there are even more genetic privacy questions:

LAST week, scientists sequenced the genome of cells taken without consent from a woman named Henrietta Lacks. She was a black tobacco farmer and mother of five, and though she died in 1951, her cells, code-named HeLa, live on. They were used to help develop our most important vaccines and cancer medications, in vitro fertilization, gene mapping, cloning. Now they may finally help create laws to protect her family’s privacy — and yours.

 The family has been through a lot with HeLa: they didn’t learn of the cells until 20 years after Lacks’s death, when scientists began using her children in research without their knowledge. Later their medical records were released to the press and published without consent. Because I wrote a book about Henrietta Lacks and her family, my in-box exploded when news of the genome broke. People wanted to know: did scientists get the family’s permission to publish her genetic information? The answer is no. [...]

The New York Daily News reports on privacy, civil liberties and surveillance issues as discussed by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg (I). He talked about the use of aerial drones (also known as unmanned aerial vehicles, “UAVs”) to conduct surveillance in the United States. See a recent post for more on moves in state and federal legislatures concerning privacy and restrictions on such domestic use of drones. The Daily News reports:

Big Brother is watching. Now get used to it!

Envisioning a future where privacy is a thing of the past, Mayor Bloomberg said Friday it will soon be impossible to escape the watchful eyes of surveillance cameras and even drones in the city.

He acknowledged privacy concerns, but said “you can’t keep the tides from coming in.” Read more »

In a column at TechCrunch, former YouTube executive Hunter Walk discusses the issue of old actions coming back to haunt individuals via search engine results. Whether it’s goofy photos on social-networking sites or more serious actions, technology can make permanent these actions. Walk writes:

Search engines have long memories. I think about this whenever I read new coverage of some immoral,  misanthropic or illegal act. [...] Years from now it’s possible, even likely, that when the perpetrators’ names are Googled, these histories will be what surfaces first for them. An employer, a girlfriend or boyfriend, or a neighbor will find out about what they once did years ago. Whatever the context, their past will be very hard to escape.

“Good,” you might say. And I largely agree, although Google’s recall impacts folks who weren’t criminal or stupid in their activities, maybe just youthful or a victim themselves. Star Wars Kid anyone? Read more »