Adrian Chen writes on Gawker: … A Google engineer spied on four underage teens for months before the company was notified of the abuses. David Barksdale, a 27-year-old former Google engineer, repeatedly took advantage of his position as a member of an elite technical group at the company to access users’ accounts, violating the privacy…
Category: Breaches
Pittsburgh settles lawsuit over exposing confidential medical info
Joe Smydo of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports that one of two federal lawsuits recently settled by the Pittsburgh City Council involved a breach of confidential medical information both in a public meeting and online. Although this is a settlement and not a court or jury decision, what’s interesting is that the basis for claim was violation…
Company Hit With $459 Million Judgment Over ‘Junk Fax’ Transmissions
Greg Land reports: A now-defunct home improvement company has been hit with a $459 million “junk fax” judgment following a four-hour bench trial, said plaintiffs attorney Marc B. Hershovitz. The case, originally filed in 2003, targeted American Home Services Inc. for sending unsolicited fax advertisements to 306,000 class members in violation of the Telephone Consumer…
UK: Police legal advice gives spam RIPA protection
Amberhawk Training reports on how MPS views stored communications in terms of privacy protections: The voicemail hacking incident is still exercising MPs – especially the Labour ones who did little to protect individual privacy during the party’s decade in power (see last week’s blog). So when Assistant Commissioner John Yates of the Metropolitan Police Service…