German luxury carmaker Daimler has come under fire for carrying out blood tests on potential employees. A leading privacy advocate has condemned the practice as illegal and called for the information to be deleted. The automobile concern has defended the procedure as “completely normal” and denied any legal violations. Daimler spokeswoman Dominique Albrecht said health…
Loosening of F.B.I. Rules Stirs Privacy Concerns
Charlie Savage reports: After a Somali-American teenager from Minneapolis committed a suicide bombing in Africa in October 2008, the Federal Bureau of Investigation began investigating whether a Somali Islamist group had recruited him on United States soil. Instead of collecting information only on people about whom they had a tip or links to the teenager,…
California Court Rejects Class Action Based on Data Collection for PII Aggregation Purposes
Tanya Forsheit has an analysis and commentary on an appellate decision that may be of interest to consumers who resent merchants from requesting their zip codes: On Friday, the California Court of Appeal, Fourth Appellate District, certified for publication its October 8 opinion in Pineda v. Williams-Sonoma, the most recent in a string of decisions…
Some Thoughts on the New Surveillance
Julian Sanchez writes: Last night I spoke at “The Little Idea,” a mini-lecture series launched in New York by Ari Melber of The Nation and now starting up here in D.C., on the incredibly civilized premise that, instead of some interminable panel that culminates in a series of audience monologues-disguised-as-questions, it’s much more appealing to…