Mathew Ingram writes: Amazon, in a potentially controversial move, has started collecting information on what readers highlight in the e-books they’re reading on the company’s Kindle reader, and sharing it with others. The service doesn’t say which sections of which specific books a reader has highlighted, but it aggregates that information and displays it —…
Category: Business
Shoppers Who Can’t Have Secrets
Natasha Singer writes: […] In a country where we have a comprehensive federal law — the Fair Credit Reporting Act — giving us the right to obtain and correct financial data collected about us, no general federal statute requires behavioral data marketers to show us our files, says Ms. Rich of the F.T.C. So, is…
Observations on the Dept. of Commerce’s Privacy Inquiry
David Navetta comments: Earlier in the week, I referenced the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Notice of Inquiry concerning “Information Privacy and Innovation in the Internet Economy” (the “Inquiry”). I have now had a chance to review the document in more detail and believe that this Inquiry and the report that it generates has the potential…
Database builder faces web-scraping lawsuit
A US company faces a copyright, trespass and trade secrets lawsuit because it ‘scraped’ the website of a rival on behalf of a client. The case underlines the legal uncertainty surrounding the practice. Website ‘scraping’ is the practice of automatically taking information from a website and can be used to retrieve the contents of entire…