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The Purge Urge: When Does a Document Retention Chat Cross the Line? – Law Blog – WSJ

May 14, 2010 By Leave a Comment
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation is frequently described as the ACLU of the Internet, looking out for the little guy in the face of digital snooping and other bad, Big Brotherish behavior.

But EFF senior staff attorney Fred von Lohman had a cameo appearance of a very different nature in this week’s federal court ruling smacking LimeWire for copyright infringement. The order, issued Wednesday, granted summary judgment to 13 RIAA-represented record labels who in 2006 sued LimeWire for copyright infringement and related infractions.

On page 14 of the 59-page order, U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood suggests that von Lohman advised LimeWire COO/CTO Greg Bildson and others to destroy potentially embarrassing evidence.

Referring to LimeWire’s founding chairman, Mark Gorton, Wood writes:

“Gorton states that another attorney, Federick [sic] Von Lohman, gave LW, including Bildson, confidential legal advice regarding the need to establish a document retention program to purge incriminating information about LimeWire users’ activities.”

Reached by telephone Thursday afternoon, von Lohman said he hadn’t yet read Wood’s order.

But, he added: “To the extent that the second half of that sentence suggests that I advised LimeWire to do anything unethical or would violate their obligations, I would take issue with that.”

via The Purge Urge: When Does a Document Retention Chat Cross the Line? – Law Blog – WSJ.

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4 Reasons to Worry about Privacy on Facebook – PCWorld

May 7, 2010 By Leave a Comment

1. Privacy Regression

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has an interesting post up on its Deeplinks blog that charts Facebook’s privacy regressions from keeping your information private to making more and more of your data public.

In 2005, for example, other Facebook users could not see any of your personal information on Facebook unless they belonged “to at least one of the groups specified by you in your privacy settings,” according to the EFF blog post. By 2006, public information included “school, your specified local area, and other reasonable community limitations that we [Facebook] tell you about.” By 2007, public information included your, “name, school name, and profile picture thumbnail.” By November 2009 your publicly available information was being indexed by third-party search engines, and by December 2009, publicly available information included your “name, profile photo, list of friends and pages you are a fan of, gender, geographic region, and networks.”

That is a drastic change in privacy in just five years, although some of these changes may be attributed to Facebook’s popularity and new user features and services. Nevertheless, it will be interesting to see how much more of your information Facebook pushes into the public sphere over time.

2. Complex Privacy Settings

Facebook allows a certain level of control over some of the information you want to make private, but these controls are not as simple as they should be. For example, Facebook has an entire section in its privacy settings called “Friends, Tags and Connections” that controls what types of information about other people are displayed publicly on your profile.

But to control what your friends can share about you, you have to edit these settings under the “Applications and Websites” heading. That may appear to be a logical grouping if you’re familiar with Facebook’s privacy settings and how the social network shares your information, but a user who isn’t familiar with these policies would have a much harder time finding this setting.

There are numerous other complexities in Facebook’s privacy settings, but on the positive side they do make it relatively easy for you to opt out of having your profile indexed by third-party search engines like Bing, Google and Yahoo.

3. Unclear ‘Connections’

Facebook recently lumped a lot of information together under a new heading called Connections that includes likes and interests, friends and connections. It may also include your current city, hometown, family, relationships, networks, activities, interests, and places. The problem is Facebook is not explicitly clear about what exactly is included in Connections and how this publicly available information is listed on your profile. Here is how Facebook explains Connections in its latest privacy policy:

“Connections. Facebook enables you to connect with virtually anyone or anything you want, from your friends and family to the city you live in to the restaurants you like to visit to the bands and movies you love. Because it takes two to connect, your privacy settings only control who can see the connection on your profile page. If you are uncomfortable with the connection being publicly available, you should consider removing (or not making) the connection.”

Nowhere in Facebook’s privacy policy does it explain exactly what Connections are. It doesn’t tell you, for example, that everything included in the “Likes and Interests” section of your profile are Connections, and therefore, this information is now public.

Facebook needs to explicitly state what connections are and where they can be found on your profile.

4. Getting Rid of Likes and Interests Is Getting Harder

Facebook wants to enhance the Likes and Interests section of your Facebook profile by linking your likes and interests to actual Web pages on the Internet. Liking a movie page on IMDB.com, for example, will create a link from that Web page back to your Facebook profile. The problem is, Facebook’s new interface makes it incredibly difficult to erase your likes and interests from your profile.

via 4 Reasons to Worry about Privacy on Facebook – PCWorld.

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IRS, DOJ use social media sites to track deadbeats, criminal activity

March 17, 2010 By

Advocacy group the Electronic Frontier Foundation has obtained documents showing how law enforcement agencies and the Internal Revenue Service are gathering information from social networking sites for their investigations.

The documents were obtained via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed last December by the EFF and the University of California, Berkeley’s Samuelson Clinic. The lawsuit was filed against six federal agencies and sought information on their use of social networking sites for data collection and surveillance purposes.

The agencies named in the lawsuit were the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department, the Treasury Department, the CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

The EFF this week obtained documents from two of those agencies — the IRS and the Justice Department — that show how the government is collecting information from social networking sites, as it has been suspected of doing for some time, said Shane Witnov, a law student and spokesman for the lawsuit at the Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic. “The documents tell us clearly that the government is using social networking sites for undercover investigations,” Witnov said.

via IRS, DOJ use social media sites to track deadbeats, criminal activity.

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What your browser says about you

February 5, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Online privacy is a hot topic and the accuracy and detail with which you can be tracked as you bounce from Web site to Web site should be an issue of great concern to both consumers and corporate IT.

Many people say they don’t really care about being tracked, arguing that they have nothing to hide about where they browse and with whom they communicate, so nothing needs to be kept private.

But here’s the problem: The tracking that can now be done by paying attention to details of your Web browser is akin to the staff of a department store following you around and noting every mole and wrinkle on your body, what you’re wearing and everything you pay attention to. Then they attach flags to you so they can identify you on subsequent visits to their stores or any of their affiliates. I think everyone would care about that.

Because mostly we aren’t aware of this in-depth examination and cataloging of our browsing, we hardly think about it. Perhaps we tend to operate under the old adage, “what you don’t know won't hurt you” or “ignorance is bliss.”

As corporations become ever more skilled at following our digital tracks they acquire knowledge that enables them to maximize their messaging and selling abilities by customizing how they present themselves to us. The result? It becomes easier to sell goods, services and information to consumers.

And from the viewpoint of a corporation dealing with other corporations online, how much do you really want your competitors, suppliers and customers to have deep insight into what your staff is paying attention to online?

If you want to learn just how identifiable you are through your browser configuration, go to the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Panopticlick. Click on the big red “Test me” button and prepare to be amazed.

via What your browser says about you.

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Lawsuit seeks information on federal surveillance of social networking sites

December 7, 2009 By Leave a Comment

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the University of California, Berkeley's Samuelson Clinic have filed a lawsuit (PDF document) against six government agencies, seeking information on their use of social networking sites for data collection and surveillance.

The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. It invoked the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in seeking information from the Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Justice, Department of Treasury, Central Intelligence Agency, and Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Shane Witnov, a law student at UC Berkeley School of Law's Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic said the lawsuit was prompted by the need for more transparency around the government's use of social networking sites for information gathering purposes.

“Social networking Web sites can be invaluable sources of information. There is a wealth of information on there that can be really useful in crime protection,” he said. At the same time, an unchecked ability to gather information from such sites could be invasive of privacy, he said.

The eight-page complaint lists several media reports about law enforcement's use of social sites for surveillance purposes. One of the reports includes an Associated Press story about police searching Facebook photos for evidence of underage drinking and watching YouTube videos to identify suspected rioters.

Another example cited in the compliant is a story in The New York Times about the FBI searching the house of s social worker because of Twitter messages he sent during the G-20 summit about police movements in the city.

via Lawsuit seeks information on federal surveillance of social networking sites.

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