Andy Greenberg reports: It may come as little surprise that every time you cross the border, cameras record your license plate number and feed it into a database of driver locations. More disturbing, perhaps, is the fact that the government seems to share that automobile surveillance data with an unexpected third party: insurance companies. Documents…
Category: Govt
DMA urges Congress to back off on regulating direct marketers
The Direct Marketing Association (DMA) is dismissing congressional privacy concerns about the mass aggregation of consumer data. A bipartisan group of US House members sent letters to major data brokers about the privacy implications of data aggregation of consumer data. “By combining data from numerous offline and online sources, data brokers have developed hidden dossiers on…
ACLU Sues FBI for New GPS Tracking Memos
Adrienne Lucas writes: Today the ACLU filed a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act to force the FBI to release two memos guiding the bureau’s policy on GPS tracking. The memos were written in the wake of the Supreme Court’s January decision in U.S. v. Jones, which held that the Fourth Amendment applies when the government secretly…
In the wake of FTC settlements, confusion and dissent remain
In a somewhat frustrating Twitter chat following the Google settlement, one of the first questions – tweeted by Berin Szoka of TechFreedom – was, “How can message sent by today’s ruling be “clear” when there’s no admission of liability?” It was a question that had also been raised by one commissioner who had dissented from…