Lawsuits involving anonymous bloggers and attempts to out them were prominent in the news last week. How do the courts handle attempts to unmask bloggers and how can bloggers fight back if they have been outed? Last week, model Liskula Cohen succeeded in getting a New York court to order Google to reveal the name…
Take embarrassing pics off Facebook, Berlin warns
The German government warned job-seekers Friday to avoid posting potentially compromising pictures or remarks on social networking sites such as Facebook, citing a study about their use by employers. Consumer affairs minister Ilse Aigner “calls on citizens who use the Internet often to think about what they put online,” a spokeswoman for her ministry told…
ISP criticised for distributing the same password to all new users with no firm instruction to change it
A European ISP has admitted that all new subscribers are given the same password. The Dutch branch of Tele2 claimed that when a new subscriber signs up, they can choose a login or are assigned one and they are then sent a letter by Tele2 with their login name, password and the date their new…
Has there been a failure of anonymization?
Paul Ohm recently put out an article where he makes the dramatic claim that de-identification has failed (see http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1450006). I have heard that argument before and the argument’s primary weakness is amplified in this article – therefore I feel compelled to comment. Paul Ohm’s argument about the failure of anonymization is based on evidence that…