Mike Wereschagin reports: The district attorney for Pennsylvania’s second-most-populous county has assembled a network of advanced surveillance cameras in and around Pittsburgh and has enlisted colleagues in four surrounding counties to extend its reach into their jurisdictions. This is somewhat terrifying that a county district attorney could put the entire population of that county or…
Category: Featured News
California Supreme Court Blocks Sweeping Search Condition of Minors’ Electronic Devices and Social Media Accounts
Jamie Williams shared the great news on August 15: The California Supreme Court just rejected the government’s attempt to require a youth probationer, as a condition of release, to submit to random searches of his electronic devices and social media accounts. The trial court had imposed the condition because the judge believed teenagers “typically will…
Privacy researchers devise a noise-exploitation attack that defeats dynamic anonymity
Natasha Lomas reports: Privacy researchers in Europe believe they have the first proof that a long-theorised vulnerability in systems designed to protect privacy by aggregating and adding noise to data to mask individual identities is no longer just a theory. The research has implications for the immediate field of differential privacy and beyond — raising…
The FTC Can Rise to the Privacy Challenge, but Not Without Help From Congress
Chris Jay Hoofnagle, Woody Hartzog, Daniel J. Solove has an OpEd on ThinkTank that was republished on Lawfareblog last Friday. It begins: Facebook’s recent settlement with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has reignited debate over whether the agency is up to the task of protecting privacy. Many people, including some skeptics of the FTC’s ability…