The Washington Post has a story on the privacy of newborn children’s DNA, noting that sometimes the medical data is collected and retained without parents’ knowledge or consent. The data collection is done when children are born in hospitals. “Hospitals prick the heels of more than 4 million babies born each year in the United States to collect a few drops of blood under state programs requiring that all newborns be screened for dozens of genetic disorders.”

A group of parents [is] challenging Minnesota’s practice of storing babies’ blood samples and allowing researchers to study them without their permission. The confrontation, and a similar one in Texas, has focused attention on the practice at a time when there is increasing interest in using millions of these collected “blood spots” to study diseases.

Michigan, for example, is moving millions of samples from a state warehouse in Lansing to freezers in a new “neonatal biobank” in Detroit in the hopes of helping make the economically downtrodden city a center for biomedical research. The National Institutes of Health, meanwhile, is funding a $13.5 million, five-year project aimed at creating a “virtual repository” of blood samples from around the country. (more…)

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.” (more…)

The Financial Times discusses social networking sites and privacy in a recent editorial.

So it is to be welcomed that Europe’s data-protection commissioners have decided that a new regulatory framework is needed to protect privacy in this new world. Facebook, which has emerged as the leader in this open social web, has shown encouraging signs of grappling with these issues, for instance, by giving its users more controls over how their information is shared. At times, though, that has only come after loud complaints from users, and the trial-and-error approach of one company needs the backing of a coherent framework of regulation. (more…)

The Center for Digital Democracy, Privacy Rights Clearinghouse and US PIRG have filed comments (pdf) with the Federal Communications Commission concerning privacy and broadband services. The FCC released a Notice of Inquiry (pdf) on April 8 requesting input on a national broadband plan. Broadcasting & Cable reports:

In comments to the FCC Monday, CDD and company said that should include concentrating on data security, minimizing data collection and study how online data is being used. Monday was the deadline for comments on the national broadband rollout plan Congress has asked it to come up with by next February.

Specifically, the groups want the FCC to regulate deep-packet inspection (DPI) and targeted behavioral advertising, saying industry self-regulation has “failed,” and to better investigate the privacy implications of so-called “cloud” computing.

The keys, they argue are giving consumers more information and data about these practices and protecting children from unfair marketing practices.

The Asheville Citizen-Times reports on a ruling concerning privacy from the North Carolina Court of Appeals, which quotes a 1928 decision by Justice Brandeis that was cited in 1989 by Justice Scalia (”The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.”): 

The Graham County school board violated employees’ constitutional rights by deciding to subject them to random tests for drugs and alcohol, the state Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday. [...]

Reversing an order by Superior Court Judge James U. Downs, the appeals court ruled the policy violates the North Carolina constitution’s prohibitions on unreasonable searches.

“Constitutional rights are not lightly cast aside,” Judge Linda Stephens wrote for a unanimous three-judge panel. (more…)

The Houston Chronicle reports:

Two of the nine pilots fired by Continental Airlines in an alleged pension scam say that if Continental believes their divorces were phony, the carrier should tell that to the state court judges who granted the divorces.

Instead, Eddie Lindsey and Cindy Ernst said in interviews Wednesday with the Houston Chronicle, they were subjected to intrusive investigations under threat of termination during which Continental attorneys asked intimate questions about their marital relations, finances, children and living arrangements. (more…)