Stanford Center for Internet and Society

A colleague and I were just discussing a new international working group, chaired by the FBI, which has “band[ed] together to fight cyber crime in a synergistic way.” The group is called the Strategic Alliance Cyber Crime Working Group; it even has a tagline: “Cyber Solidarity: Five Nations, One Mission.”

EPIC fellow Guilherme Roschke writes about the sophisticated Facebook presence of Greater Manchester Police and its ramifications for citizen privacy. He notes that "[l]aw enforcement use of applications will significantly expand the reach of what law enforcement can see, and also provide a more surreptitious viewing ability."

Please find his post here.

Ars Technica reports:

"Texas native Cathryn Elaine Harris has filed a lawsuit against Blockbuster, alleging that the company is actively and knowingly violating the Video Privacy Protection Act by reporting users' activities back to Facebook. The suit seeks to be certified as a class action, and asks that Blockbuster pay out $2,500 per incident in which it disclosed personally identifiable information."

Highlights of Thursday’s FCC hearing at Stanford in no particular order:

1. Finding myself nodding in vigorous agreement with the testimony of the Christian Coalition of America.

The MIT/Stanford VLAB hosted an interesting event this week on the impact of personal genome services on the healthcare industry. Privacy was discussed, but not featured. Here is a thoughtful analysis of the privacy issues around genomic research, generally, from Nature Reviews.

The European Commission’s Article 29 Working Party has released its “Opinion on data protection issues related to search engines,” recommending a shorter retention period for search logs. Today, industry standards run between 13 (Yahoo!, AOL) and 18 months (Google, Microsoft), following which the log is partially (Google) or completely (Microsoft) anonymized.

Nestled in among the latest round of public comments solicited by the Federal Trade Commission on “behavioral advertising” was a little gem: a filing by the Newspaper Association of America arguing that online news outlets have a First Amendment right to track the activities of website visitors in order to target advertisements to them.