Computer Ethics, Summer 2011

LT 412;  6:00-9:00 TTh, June 7, Class 5

Read Baase, chapter 2

AOL search leak
Pennsylvania school laptops 1
Facebook
SCOTUS cases on privacy
Video surveillance
Choicepoint and Acxiom, and other databases
Search records and forensics
Theories of privacy
email workplace privacy


Midterm: coming up this weekend?

AOL search leak, 2006

Moral: some data just cannot be anonymized.

Baase p 48: search-query data: Google case, AOL leak.
In August 2006, AOL leaked (actually, released) 20,000,000 queries from ~650,000 people. MANY of the people involved could be individually identified, because they:
Many people searched for medical issues.

Wikipedia: "AOL_search_data_scandal"
   
Thelma Arnold was one person identified in the leaked data, who consented to interviews and articles about her searches.

Mirror site: http://gregsadetsky.com/aol-data/
   
An article:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/08/06/aol-proudly-releases-massive-amounts-of-user-search-data

Google strongly resisted releasing "anonymized" search data to the government.

What would make search data sufficiently anonymous?

Question: Is it ethical to use the actual AOL data in research? What guidelines should be in place?

Are there other ways to get legitimate search data for sociological research?

Where is google-search-history stored on your computer?

What constitutes "consent" to a privacy policy?
Are these binding? (Probably yes, legally, though that is still being debated)

Have we in any way consented to having our search data released?

Finally, how can we do research on searches? Do we have to have a position at Google?

Pennsylvania school laptops

In the Lower Merion school district in Ardmore PA, school-owned laptops were sent home with students. School officials have now been accused of spying on students by turning on the laptops' cameras remotely, while the laptops were in the students' homes.

The school's position is that remote camera activation was only done when the laptop was reported lost or stolen, as part of the LANRev software package (see also the open-source preyproject.com site). Note that the current owners of LANRev now state:

We discourage any customer from taking theft recovery into their own hands," said Stephen Midgley, the company's head of marketing, in an interview Monday. "That's best left in the hands of professionals."

However, the AP article on the incident states the following:

The Robbinses said they learned of the alleged webcam images when Lindy Matsko, an assistant principal at Harriton High School, told their son that school officials thought he had engaged in improper behavior at home. The behavior was not specified in the suit.

"(Matsko) cited as evidence a photograph from the webcam embedded in minor plaintiff's personal laptop issued by the school district," the suit states.

Supposedly the camera was activated because the laptop was reported as missing, but that in the case in question the laptop was declared missing by the school because insurance fees were not paid. Matsko saw the student ingesting something that looked to her like drug capsules; the student in question claimed it was Mike-and-Ike candy and there was considerable corroborating evidence that that was the case.

Some technical details, including statements made by Mike Perbix of the school's IS department, are available at http://strydehax.blogspot.com/2010/02/spy-at-harrington-high.html. The stryde.hax article also makes the following claims:
The first, if true, would seem odd; the other points are fairly standard (though black electrical tape is wonderfully effective at disabling what the camera can see).

Note that public schools are part of the government, and, as such, must abide by the Fourth Amendment (though schools may be able to search lockers on school property). (Loyola, as a private institution, is not so bound, though there are also several Federal statutes that appear to apply.)

Students and parents do sign an Acceptable Use policy. However, a signature is required for the student to be issued a laptop. Also, students are minors, and it appears to be the case that parents are not authorized to sign away the rights of minors.

In April 2010 the school's attorneys issued a report claiming there was no "wrongdoing", but nonetheless documenting rather appalling privacy practices. Some information from the report is at http://www.physorg.com/news192193693.html. The most common problem was that eavesdropping was not terminated even after the equipment was found.

Event data recorders in automobiles

Who owns the data? Should you know it is there?

What if it's explained on page 286 of the owners manual?

Should it be possible to use it AGAINST you?

See wikipedia: "Event_data_recorder"

Facebook and privacy

When did Facebook stop being "closed", ie access was limited to your "network" (eg Loyola)? Did anyone care?

Facebook know a lot about you. It knows
In May 2010 Facebook introduced changes requiring that some of your information be visible to everyone: your name, your schools, your interests, your picture, your friends list, and the pages you are a "fan" of. Allegedly your "like" clicks also became world-readable. Here's an article by Vadim Lavrusik spelling out why this can be a problem: http://mashable.com/2010/01/12/facebook-privacy-detrimental. Lavrusik's specific concern is that he sometimes joins Facebook groups as part of journalistic investigation, not out of any sense of shared interest.

Here's a timeline of the progressive privacy erosion at facebook: eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebook-timeline

Facebook also has proposed "sharing" agreements with some other sites, and made data-sharing with those sites the default. Some of the sites (from readwriteweb.com) are:
Right now it appears that Facebook has again stepped back from a full roll-out of the sharing feature.

Facebook has long tinkered with plans for allowing a wide range of third-party sites to have access to your facebook identity. Back in 2007, this project was code-named Beacon. Supposedly the Beacon project has been dropped, but it seems the idea behind it has not.

Ironically, third-party sites might not need Facebook's cooperation to get at least some information about their visitors (such as whether they are even members of Facebook). Your browser itself may be giving this away. See http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/socialhistoryjs. (Note that this technique, involving the third party's setting up invisible links to facebook.com, myspace.com, etc, and then checking the "link color" (doable even though the link is invisible!) to see if the link has been visited recently, cannot reveal your username.)

After resisting the most recent uproar for a couple weeks, Facebook once again changed. However, they did not apologize, or admit that they had broken their own past rules.

Here's an essay from the EFF, http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/05/facebook-should-follow, entitled Facebook Should Follow Its Own Principles, in which they point out that Facebook's 2009 principles (announced after a similar uproar) state

People should have the freedom to decide with whom they will share their information, and to set privacy controls to protect those choices.

But Facebook's initial stance in 2010 was that users always had the freedom to quit facebook if they didn't like it. Here's part of Elliot Schrage, FB VP for Public Policy, as quoted in a May 11, 2010 article at http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/11/facebook-executive-answers-reader-questions:

Joining Facebook is a conscious choice by vast numbers of people who have stepped forward deliberately and intentionally to connect and share. We study user activity. We’ve found that a few fields of information need to be shared to facilitate the kind of experience people come to Facebook to have. That’s why we require the following fields to be public: name, profile photo (if people choose to have one), gender, connections (again, if people choose to make them), and user ID number.

later, when asked why "opt-in" (ie initially private) was not the default, Schrage said

Everything is opt-in on Facebook. Participating in the service is a choice. We want people to continue to choose Facebook every day. Adding information — uploading photos or posting status updates or “like” a Page — are also all opt-in. Please don’t share if you’re not comfortable.

That said, much of your information is still public by default.


Two weeks after Schrage's claim that users would always be free not to use Facebook if they didn't like it, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg weighed in, with a May 24, 2010 article in the Washington Post: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37314726/ns/technology_and_science-washington_post/?ns=technology_and_science-washington_post. In the article, Zuckerberg does not seem to acknowledge that any mistakes were made. He does, however, give some Facebook "principles":
The first principle is a step back from the corresponding 2009 principle.

Facebook vigorously claims that your information is not shared with advertisers, by which they mean that your name is not shared. However, your age, interests, and general location (eg town) are shared, leading to rather creepy advertisements at best, and cases where your identity can be inferred at worst.

Recall that advertisers are facebook's real customers. They are the ones who pay the bills. The users are just users.

 
Deja News, once at deja.com (now run by google): where is it now? It still lets you search archives of old usenet posts, though the social significance of that is reduced in direct proportion to the reduced interest in Usenet. Think of being able to search for someone's years-old facebook posts, though (and note that there's no reason Facebook can't just enable this).
 
Facebook mini-feeds, Baase p 55
Allowed active notification to your friends whenever you change your page. Why was this considered to be a privacy issue?

I note that lots of people have left these enabled.

Whatever one says about Facebook as a source of privacy lost, it is pretty clear to everyone that posting material to Facebook is under our control, though perhaps only in the sense that we participate in Facebook voluntarily. Thus, the Facebook privacy question is really all about whether we can control who knows what about us, and continue to use Facebook.

Facebook and other sites

Facebook now shows up on unrelated sites. Sites are encouraged to enable the Facebook "like" button, and here's an example of theonion.com displaying my (edited) friends and their likes: http://cs.luc.edu/pld/ethics/theonionplusFB.html. How much of this is an invasion of privacy?

While Facebook does seem interested in data-sharing agreements with non-FB sites, it is often not at all clear when such sharing is going on. The two examples here, for example, do not necessarily involve any sharing. An embedded "like" button, when clicked, sends your information to Facebook, which can retrieve your credentials by using cookies. However, those credentials are hopefully not shared with the original site; the original site may not even know you clicked "like". As for the box at theonion.com listing what my friends like, this is again an example of "leased page space": Facebook leases a box on theonion.com and, when you visit the site, it retrieves your FB credentials via cookie and then fills in the box with your friends' "likes" of Onion articles. The box is like a mini FB page; neither the likes nor your credentials are shared with The Onion.

One concern with such pseudo-sharing sites is that they make it look like sharing is in fact taking place, defusing objections to such sharing. If someone does object, the fact that no sharing was in fact invoved can be trotted out; if there are not many objections, Facebook can pursue "real" sharing agreements with confidence. They also make it harder to tell when objectionable sharing is occurring.

An example of a true data-sharing agreement would be if a restaurant-review site let you log into their site using your Facebook cookies, and then allowed you to post updates about various restaurants.


Finally, here is a lengthy essay by Eben Moglen, author of the GPL, on "Freedom in the Cloud: Software Freedom, Privacy, and Security for Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing": http://www.softwarefreedom.org/events/2010/isoc-ny/FreedomInTheCloud-transcript.html. Mr Moglen adds some additional things that can be inferred from Facebook-type data:
You get free email, free websites, and free spying too!

Mr. Zuckerberg has attained an unenviable record: he has done more harm to the human race than anybody else his age.

Because he harnessed Friday night. That is, everybody needs to get laid and he turned it into a structure for degenerating the integrity of human personality and he has to a remarkable extent succeeded with a very poor deal. Namely, “I will give you free web hosting and some PHP doodads and you get spying for free all the time”. And it works.

Later:

I’m not suggesting it should be illegal. It should be obsolete. We’re technologists, we should fix it.


Here are some of the June 2010 Facebook privacy settings, from privacy settings => view settings (basic directory information). Note that there is a clear Facebook-provided explanation for why some things are best left visible to "everyone".

Your name, profile picture, gender and networks are always open to everyone. We suggest leaving the other basic settings below open to everyone to make it easier for real world friends to find and connect with you.

* Search for me on Facebook
This lets friends find you on Facebook. If you're visible to fewer people, it may prevent you from connecting with your real-world friends.
      Everyone

* Send me friend requests
This lets real-world friends send you friend requests. If not set to everyone, it could prevent you from connecting with your friends.
      Everyone

* Send me messages
This lets friends you haven't connected with yet send you a message before adding you as a friend.
      Everyone

* See my friend list
This helps real-world friends identify you by friends you have in common. Your friend list is always available to applications and your connections to friends may be visible elsewhere.
      Everyone

* See my education and work
This helps classmates and coworkers find you.
      Everyone

* See my current city and hometown
This helps friends you grew up with and friends near you confirm it's really you.
      Everyone

* See my interests and other Pages
This lets you connect with people with common interests based on things you like on and off Facebook.
      Everyone

Here are some more settings, from privacy settings => customize settings (sharing on facebook)

    * Things I share
          o Posts by me (Default setting for posts, including status updates and photos)
                Friends Only
          o Familyused to let you look up old
                Friends of Friends
          o Relationships
                Friends Only
          o Interested in and looking for
                Friends Only
          o Bio and favorite quotations
                Friends of Friends
          o Website
                Everyone
          o Religious and political views
                Friends Only
          o Birthday
                Friends of Friends
         .
    * Things others share
          o Photos and videos I'm tagged in
                Friends of Friends
          o Can comment on posts
                Friends Only
          o Friends can post on my Wall
                Enable
          o Can see Wall posts by friends
                Friends Only
    * Contact information
          o Friends Only

Facebook and advertising

Facebook claims that user data is not turned over to advertisers, and this seems true (with a couple slip-ups): advertisers supply criteria specifying to whom their ads will be shown, and Facebook shows the ads to those users. For example, if I see an ad for "Illinois drivers age 54", it doesn't mean that Facebook has turned over my age; it is more likely that the advertiser has created an ad for each age 30-65, perhaps, and asks Facebook to display to a user the one that matches his or her age.

Once you click on the ad, however, the advertiser does know what ad you are responding to, and thus knows your age if you choose to give them your name. There was a slip-up a couple years ago where game sites (often thinly veiled advertising) were able to obtain the Facebook ID of each user. Here's what they say:

In order to advertise on Facebook, advertisers give us an ad they want us to display and tell us the kinds of people they want to reach. We deliver the ad to people who fit those criteria without revealing any personal information to the advertiser.

For more information on how to do this, see http://www.facebook.com/adsmarketing/index.php?sk=targeting_filters. Facebook supports targeting based on:
Note that you don't get to choose what attributes advertisers can use, because advertisers do not see them! And Facebook itself has access to everything (duh).

Facebook and privacy more fine-grained than the Friend level

What if you've Friended your family, and your school friends, and want to put something on your wall that is visible to only one set? The original Facebook privacy model made all friends equal, which was sometimes a bad idea. Facebook has now introduced the idea of groups: see http://www.facebook.com/groups. Groups have been around quite a while, but have been repositioned by some (with Facebook encouragement) as subsets of Friend pools:

Have things you only want to share with a small group of people? Just create a group, add friends, and start sharing. Once you have your group, you can post updates, poll the group, chat with everyone at once, and more.

For better or worse, groups are still tricky to manage, partly because they were not initially designed as Friend subsets. When posting to a group, you have to go to the group wall; you can't put a message on your own wall and mark it for a particular group. News feeds for group posts are sometimes problematic, and Facebook does not make clear what happens if a group posting is newsfed to your profile and then you Comment on it. You may or may not have to update your privacy settings to allow group posts to go into your newsfeed. Privacy Settings do not mention Groups at all (as of June 2011).

Maybe the biggest concern, however, is that Facebook's fast-and-furious update tradition is at odds with the fundamental need to be meticulous when security is important.

Caller ID

When it first came out in the early 1990's, Caller ID was widely seen as a privacy intrusion. That is, it took away your "right" to call someone anonymously. Actually, that is a plausible right if you're calling a commercial enterprise; if you don't want them calling you back, you should be able to refuse to give them your number.

Within a decade, Caller ID was widely seen as a privacy boost: you could control who could interrupt you. This is privacy in sense #2 above; the original issue was privacy in sense #1.

Caller ID never caught on with stores; it did catch on with ordinary people.

Is there any right to phone someone anonymously? What if you're trying to give the police a tip? What if you're a parole officer?


Facebook "connections": http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/05/things-you-need-know-about-facebook

Your connections are not communications with other users, but are links to your school, employer, and interests. It is these that Facebook decided to make "public".


Personalization

We understand that all sorts of online purchasing information is collected about us in order for the stores to sell to us again. Whenever I go to amazon.com, I am greeted with book suggestions based on past purchases. But at what point does this information cross the line to become "personalized pitches"?

What if the seller has determined that we are in the category "price-sensitive shopper", and they then call/mail/email us with pitches that offer us the "best price" or "best value"? (See the box on Baase, p 78, for a related example.)

Political parties do this kind of personalization all the time: they tailor their pre-election canvassing to bring up what they believe are the hot-button issues for you personally.


SCOTUS cases on privacy -- Baase pp 69ff


1928: Olmstead v United States: 4th amendment does NOT apply to wiretaps

1967: Katz v United States
4th amendment does too apply to wiretaps! Privacy may still exist in a public area.
Katz was using a pay phone; the FBI had a microphone just outside the phone booth. To the appellate court, the fact that the microphone did not intrude into the phone booth was significant in finding for the FBI, but the supreme court reversed.

Doctrine of "reasonable expectation of privacy" (REoP) replaced the doctrine of "physical intrusion"

Problem with REoP: as technology marches on, isn't our reasonable expectation diminished? And does this then give the government more license to spy?


1976: US v Miller
information we share with others (eg our bank) is NOT private. Government can ask the bank, and get this information, without a warrant. (However, the bank could in those days refuse.)

1979: Smith v Maryland
Reduction of REoP by the police is not SUPPOSED to diminish our 4th-amendment rights. However, in that case the supreme court ruled that "pen registers" to record who you were calling did NOT violate the 4th amendment.

http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?navby=CASE&court=US&vol=442&page=735


Application of the Fourth Amendment depends on whether the person invoking its protection can claim a "legitimate expectation of privacy" that has been invaded by government action. This inquiry normally embraces two questions: first, whether the individual has exhibited an actual (subjective) expectation of privacy; and second, whether his expectation is one that society is prepared to recognize as "reasonable."

First, we doubt that people in general entertain any actual expectation of privacy in the numbers they dial. All telephone users realize that they must "convey" phone numbers to the telephone company, since it is through telephone company switching equipment that their calls are completed. All subscribers realize, moreover, that the phone company has facilities for making permanent records of the numbers they dial....

If you want to keep a number private, don't call it!

Note the crucial issue that the defendant voluntarily shared the number with the phone company!

Justices Stewart & Brennan dissented

The telephone conversation itself must be electronically transmitted by telephone company equipment, and may be recorded or overheard by the use of other company equipment. Yet we have squarely held that the user of even a public telephone is entitled "to assume that the words he utters into the mouthpiece will not be broadcast to the world." Katz v. United States

What do you think of this distinction? Is there a difference between sharing your phone number with the phone company and sharing your actual conversation with them?


2001: Kyllo v United States

Thermal imaging of your house IS a 4th-amendment search! This is a very important case in terms of how evolution in technology affects what is a REoP

http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/99-8508.ZS.html

Held: Where, as here, the Government uses a device that is not in general public use, to explore details of a private home that would previously have been unknowable without physical intrusion, the surveillance is a Fourth Amendment “search,” and is presumptively unreasonable without a warrant.

How long into the future will this hold? Could it be that part of the issue was that the general public was not very aware of the possibility of thermal imaging? If thermal imaging were to come into not only general public awareness but also general public use (eg by equipping cellphones with IR cameras), would the situation change?

I believe there was a trial-level civil case in which a judge ruled that eavesdropping on someone else's phone call made on an old-fashioned cordless phone (remember those?) was not an invasion of privacy because no one had a "reasonable expectation of privacy" when using a cordless phone because "everyone" knew that it was easy to listen in to someone else's call simply by playing with the channel button. However, I cannot find this case.


The FBI and cellphone location records
nearest-tower (cell-handoff) records v GPS records
Supposedly the Justice Department gets warrants for GPS data (nearest few feet), but usually does not for nearest-tower data (which positions you to within a few miles at worst, a few hundred feet at best).

Another distinction is between realtime data (where you are now) and "historical" data (where you were).

The federal government has tried to claim that nearest-tower data simply amounted to "routine business records". Are they?


Video surveillance -- Baase p 72


This is a big issue in Chicago, where there are both "obvious" and "hidden" cameras.

2001 Super Bowl: Tampa police used facial-recognition software on all 100,000 fans. It didn't work terribly well.

London: heavy camera use to:

London in 2005:
What about the rate of false positives?

Should the London cameras be used to track lesser crimes, such as pickpocketing? Supposedly the Chicago street cameras have been quite effective in handling minor crimes.


ChoicePoint and Acxiom


Look at the websites. Are these sites bad? (ChoicePoint is now LexisNexis.com/risk (for Risk Solutions)

What if you are hiring someone to work with children? Do such employees have any expectation of privacy with regard to their past?

ChoicePoint sells to government agencies data that those agencies are often not allowed to collect directly. Is this appropriate?

ChoicePoint might argue that it is similar to a credit bureau, though exempt from the rules of the Fair Credit Act because they don't actually deal with credit information.

Baase p 60: "At least 35 government agencies are or were clients of ChoicePoint". Some of the data collected (again from Baase):

From the Acxiom website (http://www.acxiom.com/products_and_services/background_screening/faq/Pages/FAQs.aspx)

Must I supply applicants’ dates of birth?

Date of birth is critical to the criminal record search process. The majority of courts use date of birth as a primary identifier, but please note that a handful actually require this piece of information to process requests. However, Acxiom offers alternative options to customers who are unable to supply this information. Our toll-free Applicant Date of Birth Line allows applicants to call and register date of birth information via a touchtone answering system. Acxiom then retrieves this information for use in the search process, subsequently reporting “match” or “non-match” record results to the customer while never divulging the specifics of the date of birth. Additionally, date of birth information may be confidentially submitted via a specially dedicated URL (www.acxiomdob.com) that forwards applicants to an internal 128-bit SSL encrypted website where they are prompted to enter the needed information.

Why is this an issue?

You can not legally ask age in a job interview in the US, if you have four or more employees.
    http://smallbusiness.findlaw.com/employment-employer/employment-employer-hiring/employment-employer-hiring-interview-legal.html

You can ask the candidate to authorize the release of a credit report (you can't get the credit report without asking). However, several states are considering banning this practice (except for jobs involving responsibility for money), on the theory that applicants can't say no, and that it makes it much harder for those who have had credit problems ever to recover.


Baase p 61: case study on federal DB on all US college students. The database would list all courses taken, with grades; it would also include loan and scholarship records.

Good example of a fairly common situation: creation of a new database containing confidential information.

Benefits:

Drawbacks:

Is such a database a good idea?

What if in 2012 a law is passed giving prospective employers access to the data, if the job applicant signs a consent form? What do you think would happen if you refused to sign?

Related "database-matching" issue: should the government be able to link databases of:


Joe the Plumber

aka Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher

He went to an Obama rally and asked a serious question about Obama's tax plan (in which he apparently confused income with profit). Obama made his "spread the wealth" remark in response. After this was in the press, McCain ran with it, and referred to him multiple times in the debate, as a symbol of middle-america and small businesses.

One reporter (in a print newspaper column I failed to save) argued that Wurzelbacher should have no expectation of privacy. At what point does this become true? Is it true of Obama? Was it true for Palin, or McCain? Wurzelbacher did try to capitalize on his sudden fame, and some might argue that in doing so he lost his expectation of privacy. But suppose he had tried to remain a private citizen?

Allegations about him:
Lucas county clerk of courts: http://apps.co.lucas.oh.us/onlinedockets/Default.aspx

Search for "Wurzelbacher".

Is the availability of this kind of search appropriate?

See also Baase, §2.3.5, on Public Records. Her examples include:

What of the above is legitimate to talk about for a private citizen?
At what point did Wurzelbacher stop being a private citizen?

Wurzelbacher asked Obama a financial question. Does this make W's income and taxes fair game? What about his child-support records?

Aw, to hell with facts: see http://www.slate.com/id/2202480

Search records and computer forensics

In 2002, Justin Barber was found shot four times on a beach in Florida. None of his injuries were serious. His wife April, however, had been shot dead. Barber described the event as an attempted robbery.

There were some other factors though:
Police searched Barber's computer for evidence of past google searches. They apparently did not contact google directly. Barber had searched for information on gunshot wounds, specifically to the chest, and under what circumstances they were less serious. Barber was convicted.

More at: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10150669-38.html


Case of Lee Harbert:
Harbert's vehicle struck and killed Gurdeep Kaur in 2005. Harbert fled the scene. When arrested later, his defense was that he thought he had hit a deer. But his on-computer searches were for
    "auto glass reporting requirements to law enforcement"
    "auto glass, Las Vegas" (the crime was in California)
    "auto theft"
He also searched for information on the accident itself. Harbert too was convicted.
   
more at http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10143275-38.html


Case of Wendi Mae Davidson
Police found her husband's body in a pond at the ranch where Davidson boarded her horse. Police found the ranch itself by attaching a GPS recorder to her car. Davidson also used an online search engine to search for the phrase "decomposition of a body in water".

More at http://news.cnet.com/Police-Blotter-Murderer-nabbed-via-tracking,-Web-search/2100-7348_3-6234678.html


How do such cases relate to the AOL search-data leak, and Thelma Arnold?
While none of those individuals was charged with anything, some of their searches (particularly those related to violent pornography) are rather disturbing.

Case of Antoine Jones
Jones was an alleged cocaine dealer in the Washington, DC area. Police attached a GPS tracker to his car while it was parked in the driveway. By following him over a 30-day period, the police were able to build a strong case against him. But Jones argued that such tracking was unreasonable warrantless search, despite a 1983 Supreme Court ruling that allowed wireless tracking for single trips.

In August 2010, the DC Court of Appeals agreed, and overturned his conviction.

The ninth circuit and the seventh circuit (including Illinois) have ruled otherwise, however.

We're still waiting for a final decision on US v Antoine Jones. The DC Appellate Court overturned his conviction because the GPS monitoring was for more than one or two trips; the Seventh and Ninth circuits ruled differently however. The DC Appellate Court did, in November 2010, deny the US a rehearing en banc, which means the US will either appeal to the Supreme Court or lose.


Where is google-search-history stored on your computer? Is it stored anywhere, anymore?


Theories of Privacy

Is it obsolete?

See Baase, p 92. Is it true that "young people of today" are not as concerned about privacy?

WHY?

Warren and Brandeis, 1890

(Louis Brandeis later became a supreme-court justice.) They argue for the principle of "inviolate personality" that gives everyone specific rights regarding their personal information. Their primary concern was apparently newspaper gossip columns. Their argument was that repeating "private" information about someone violated a fundamental right. Baase, p 106.

Problems arise here because Warren and Brandeis were not able to formulate precisely what was meant by an "inviolate personality", or to explain at what point your rights to your inviolate personality give way to the Public's Right To Know. For government officials, for example, the right of the voters to know what they are really like might be very important.

Another issue is that WB seemed most concerned with publication of data that violated our privacy. What if it is just made available to a selected few? Employers? People on some committee at our church? Car-rental agencies? People with some self-defined Need To Know, such as our annoying neighbors? This is not normally understood to be publication.

Thomson, 1975

Judith Jarvis Thomson argued against the WB position, claiming that every time a privacy right is violated, there is in fact some other, more concrete, right being violated. Hence, we do not need special privacy rules. One of her examples is the Magazine Scenario: if you don't want people to read it, you can keep it private. If they break into your house, they have broken the law. If someone interrogates you violently and thus obtains private information, the real issue is the violence and not the privacy invasion. If a company reveals information about you in a way that is contrary to their own privacy policy that you accepted, they are violating your contractual rights. A less-clear example is the Shower Scenario: she argues that if someone peeps at you while you shower, they have violated your "right to your person". Is this just a WB-style privacy right, or is the "right to your person" more concrete and limited?

Others have tried to find examples where your right to privacy was violated, but no other rights were. What if someone reads your email? Are there other rights involved besides your right to privacy?

Transactions

On pp 108-109, Baase describes a scenario involving Joe, Maria, and some potatoes. Joe buys the potatoes from Maria; Maria sells the potatoes to Joe. Who owns the information about the transaction? Either party might want the information kept private; does the other party then have an obligation to keep it so? Or does the privacy-concerned party have to add that into the contract up-front, so that if Joe wants it private then he might have to pay more, or if Maria wants it private then she might have to charge less?

Who is the transaction about?

Another example is the making of "connections" visible to Everyone on Facebook: which party is in charge here?

In the real world, sellers are often large corporations. When we as individuals buy things, the balance of power is skewed in favor of the larger seller. Does this change things?

Property Rights to Personal Information

Do we have such rights? What about "negative" information, such as
One immediate issue is the transactions one: is a tenant's late-payment history their property, or the landlord's? Judge Richard Posner argued that personal information that is not "expensive" in the economic sense should receive more protection.