Sarah D. Sparks reports: In its effort to clarify student data privacy rules for researchers and education officials alike, the U.S. Department of Education proposed several changes to the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or FERPA, on Thursday and named its first chief privacy officer. “Data should only be shared with the right people…
Category: Featured News
Justice Department opposes digital privacy reforms
Declan McCullagh reports: The U.S. Justice Department today offered what amounts to a frontal attack on proposals to amend federal law to better protect Americans’ privacy. James Baker, the associate deputy attorney general, warned that rewriting a 1986 privacy law to grant cloud computing users more privacy protections and to require court approval before tracking…
Applying the Mosaic Theory of the Fourth Amendment to Disclosure of Stored Records
Orin Kerr writes: I’ve blogged a few times about United States v. Maynard, the controversial D.C. Circuit case holding that over time, GPS surveillance begins to be a search that requires a warrant. Maynard introduced a novel mosaic theory of the Fourth Amendment: Although individual moments of surveillance were not searches, when you added up the surveillance…
Why unsubscribing might not have protected you from the Epsilon breach
Back in December 2010, when Walgreens sent out its first breach notifications, one of the troubling aspects was that despite the fact that consumers had unsubscribed from their mailings, their data had been retained. The December 2010 notification email read, in part: We realize you previously unsubscribed from promotional emails from Walgreens, and that will continue. As a…