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: U.S.
Court: Posting online can be invasion of privacy
In a case that seems like deja vu all over again, the Minnesota Court of Appeals held that posting someone else’s embarrassing personal information on the Internet can be a legal invasion of privacy, regardless of how many people view the site. In this case, the personal information concerned a woman’s sexually transmitted disease that…
Atlanta cop sentenced for warrantless break-in
Former Atlanta Police sergeant Wilbert Stallings was sentenced last week to prison for conspiring to violate civil rights by breaking into a private residence to search for drugs without a warrant. The incident occurred in October 2005, but was not uncovered until one of Stallings’ subordinates was involved in another incident and began cooperating with…
AP Issues Strict Facebook, Twitter Guidelines to Staff
The Associated Press is adopting a stringent social-networking policy for its employees, informing them to police their Facebook profiles “to make sure material posted by others doesn’t violate AP standards.” The policy (.pdf) comes weeks after an AP reporter was reprimanded for posting a comment to his own Facebook profile criticizing the Sacramento-based newspaper chain…