When I was in law school, I went to a luncheon at which famed legal scholar Arthur Miller spoke. His topic, still a fresh one back in the mid-1980s, was the amount of private information floating around in computers. His target was American corporations. He felt that American corporations were collecting too much consumer data,…
Category: Misc
Privacy, Identity, Responsibility
Mottoes matter. Long before soundbites and tweets, they encapsulated the priorities of their adopters. Long before the Internet, the most famous claimed world wide reach. Compared to the revolutionary “Liberty, equality, fraternity,” my motto may seem a modest mimic. Do not confuse the modesty of its author with its intrinsic value. “Privacy, identity, responsibility” must…
Privacy Requires Security, Not Abstinence
Simson Garfinkel has written a commentary on the state of privacy and security in Technology Review. Here’s a bit from his conclusion: For more than 100 years, American jurisprudence has recognized privacy as a requirement for democracy, social relations, and human dignity. For nearly 50, we’ve understood that protecting privacy takes more than just controlling…
FTC obtains $1.7 million judgment against InterBill
A federal court has ordered a payment processor that debited consumers’ bank accounts without their authorization to pay $1,779,000 in consumer redress and to end the illegal practice. Payment processors serve as middlemen between merchants and banks or credit card companies. In 2006, the Federal Trade Commission charged the defendants with unfairly debiting thousands of…