Stanford Center for Internet and Society

Last year, I complained about the Cablevision case (see ”IP Law vs Moore’s Law”), a decision I’m pleased to see was recently reversed on appeal. Cablevision was trying to replace set-top DVRs with a centrally-managed system, a common trend in computing these days as hardware and communications improvements make hosted applications (the new term is “cloud” computing) more attractive from a cost, management, and environmental standpoint. The move ran afoul of copyright, however, and the Second Circuit struggled mightily to find a way to make the law fit common sense.

This YouTube video is a hysterical showcase of some of the privacy issues with facebook. In particular, how people are willing to reveal and falsify things online they would never say in meatspace.

Microsoft has recently blogged the details of its “InPrivate” browsing and blocking feature for IE8. InPrivate is a bona fide privacy-enhancing technology; Microsoft should be commended for taking this step. As anyone familiar with the space should realize, InPrivate also fits within and informs the complex history of the online advertising industry.

Viacom accused Google's video sharing website, YouTube of violating its copyright in a $1 billion lawsuit. And as of last week, Google and Viacom reached an agreement to allow Google's YouTube to mask important user information from records before the handover to Viacom. Law.com bloggers and co-hosts, J. Craig Williams and Bob Ambrogi welcome Attorney Kevin A. Thompson from the firm Davis McGrath LLC, and Lauren Gelman, Executive Director of Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society to discuss this case. They will discuss the legal issues, privacy rights, piracy issues and what this case means for the users, the source of business for these companies.

It’s official: Wired Magazine has placed worrying about privacy on Gmail in the final column marked “expired.” (What’s “wired”? Worrying about privacy on Google Health.) Yet here I am, continuing to fret over Google’s eons-old practice of scanning incoming and outgoing messages in order to display contextual ads.

In my defense, I don’t think some evil Google Adwords employee is sitting in his brightly lit hexagonical reading through my email and twisting an ironic mustache. I recognize that it’s a dispassionate (for now) computer that scans for keywords and selects contextual ads.

My concern has to do with competition: Gmail puts Google’s advertisers in a position to use the content of their competitors’ emails to compete with them.

I notice that Google now has a privacy policy link on its homepage. Congratulations to Marc and others who pushed for this.

It's tempting to view this move cynically as a dragged-out response to a long-standing complaint from the privacy community. My understanding, however, is that there has been internal debate at Google over whether to include a privacy link on the homepage for some time. One argument against such a link is that it conveys the sense that a given company respects privacy, irrespective of the actual content of the policy (which, as we know, often goes unread).

I'm not saying Google did this on purpose, but I think that many more people are likely to click on the privacy link, given that it appeared suddenly on the zealously sparse Google homepage. (Unless, of course, they get distracted by the fireworks.)

Threadbare as it already is, the privacy rubber may not even be meeting the road. A recent study conducted by the Ponemon Institute implies a disconnect between the perception of privacy officers – charged with formulating company policy – and marketing departments – entrusted with actual custody of customer data – with respect to how consumer information may be used.

I imagine the subset of individuals that read the Center's blogs but not, for instance, Boing Boing to be in the (low) single digits. I still could not resist posting this news story about bearded, community-gardening, anti-surveillance activists in Philly whose house was raided, initially without a warrant. In fairness, the facts are disputed: for instance, local police are calling a structure on the top floor of the raided house a possible "bunker," whereas resident Daniel Moffat (pictured) is calling it a definite "greenhouse."

Author and fellow SLS fellow Laura K. Donohue brought this deliciously ironic picture to my attention. Click here for a close up.

If you happen to be in the DC area this week, Laura is speaking on her new book, "The Cost of Counterterrorism: Power, politics, and liberty," at GW Law School on Wednesday, June 11, and the Women's Foreign Policy Group on Friday, June 13.