The Associated Press reports on a new use of customer-loyalty-card data by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that may raise privacy issues. Note that, in this case, the CDC and grocery stores first asked for customers’ permission to access the data:

As they scrambled recently to trace the source of a salmonella outbreak that has sickened hundreds around the country, investigators from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention successfully used a new tool for the first time — the shopper cards that millions of Americans swipe every time they buy groceries.

With permission from the patients, investigators followed the trail of grocery purchases to a Rhode Island company that makes salami, then zeroed in on the pepper used to season the meat. Read more »

The Wall Street Journal takes a look at privacy questions that arise from broadcasting one’s location:

As the list of programs that collect users’ location information grows, concern about privacy risks is increasing along with it.

Facebook is set to add location-sharing to its popular site next month. Meanwhile, services such as Foursquare and Loopt have been adding users, and a plethora of smaller tools have sprung up as well. But a study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University showed that the majority of the more than 80 location services it surveyed either don’t have privacy policy or collect and save all data for an indefinite amount of time. [...]

Lorrie Cranor, an associate professor of computer science and one of the authors of the study, said people also value location-based advertising in some circumstances — a good thing for the companies that are building a business around precisely that. But she said many people just don’t realize what a database of all the locations they’ve been at over time could mean.

“There are a lot of concerns about the government being able to subpoena this information,” Ms. Cranor said in an interview. She also cited divorce proceedings as a possible way in which a person’s location data could be used.

The San Francisco Chronicle has an update on NASA v. Nelson, which I’ve written about before. The case concerns a George W. Bush-era security policy at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge, which has raised substantial privacy questions. In an op-ed last year for the Los Angeles Times, Tim Rutten wrote, “NASA demanded that Caltech, which operates JPL on the space agency’s behalf, require all of the lab’s civilian scientists and engineers to sign a waiver allowing federal investigators to ransack their personal lives. The waiver empowered the feds to secretly question ex-husbands and wives, disgruntled neighbors and resentful colleagues about every detail of the subjects’ lives. If the investigators turned up anything they felt disqualified somebody, there was no provision for appeal. Anyone who refused to sign the waiver was to be fired.” Rutten wrote that this was the case though “less than 10% of the work carried out at JPL involves classified science, and the employees working on those projects already are covered by the government’s security clearance system.” The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals found for the NASA workers, barring implementation of the Bush policy.

Now, the Chronicle reports that the U.S. Supreme Court has “granted the Obama administration’s request to hear an appeal of a lower-court ruling that barred the National Aeronautics and Space Administration from conducting far-reaching inquiries into the lives of 28 workers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.” Read more »

Attorney Christopher Wolf writes about privacy rights and same-sex weddings in the District of Columbia in an op-ed for CNN.

Last week, D.C. was added to the list of those few states that permit gay marriage. A law passed in December and signed by the mayor went into effect when Congress (which has the power to reject D.C. laws) refrained from interfering.

Likewise, Chief Justice John Roberts refused an application to the U.S. Supreme Court to block the gay marriage law from going into effect, on procedural grounds, saying that the legal challenge was premature.

This should not be viewed as a ringing endorsement from the high court for gay marriage or for protecting the privacy rights of gay people.

Only two months ago, in January, the Supreme Court was not so hands-off in gay-marriage-related cases. Twice, the court intervened in cases in which active opponents of gay marriage, in California and Washington, have claimed that their right to privacy will be invaded if they are not given legal protection to be unseen and anonymous. [...] Read more »

The Washington Post has a video interview with Facebook’s Tim Sparapani. He discusses the social-networking site and questions about censorship and privacy.

The New York Times reports that social-networking site Facebook will soon add broadcasting users’ location data to its services.

Starting next month, the more than 400 million Facebook users could begin seeing a new kind of status update flow through their news feed: the current locations of their friends.

Facebook plans to take the wraps off a new location-based feature in late April at f8, the company’s yearly developer conference, according to several people briefed on the project, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss unannounced services.

In preparation for the introduction, Facebook updated its privacy policy last November. The new policy states: “When you share your location with others or add a location to something you post, we treat that like any other content you post.” Read more »