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…)

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.

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…)