Milt Policzer reports: The former owner of a Beverly Hills-based magazine has filed a complaint seeking $5 million from actor Tom Cruise, celebrity lawyer Bertram Fields and private investigator Anthony Pellicano that claims he was illegally wiretapped after Cruise filed a defamation suit against him. Michael Davis Sapir, in a suit filed in Superior Court,…
The Tort of Privacy’s Racist Past
Danielle Citron had a really interesting post today about how some have attempted to use privacy protections to shield them from exposure of bigotry: As New York Times v. Sullivan made clear, defamation has a bigoted past. There, Montgomery, Alabama’s police commissioner brought a defamation suit against The New York Times after it published an…
Facebook Privacy Complaint Ignites War of Words
JR Raphael reports that a complaint filed by EPIC and nine other privacy groups with the FTC concerning Facebook privacy changes has generated a response from Facebook: Facebook, in response, says it’s already spoken with the FTC and other regulators about the changes. A representative from the company notes that the revised privacy policy also…
Privacy and ethics: discussing celebrities’ private lives
Over on Chronicles of Dissent, I’ve been blogging about privacy issues and the ethics of psychologists discussing celebrities’ personal lives. Part 1 of the discussion uses the Tiger Woods scandal and Brittany Murphy death to illustrate some ethical concerns and it includes statements from the ethics codes of the Society of Professional Journalists, the American…