Supreme Court case to consider limits on workplace privacy

The Supreme Court last week agreed to hear arguments in a case on employee privacy and the extent to which government agencies can monitor the content of personal communications made by their employees while using government-owned…

If you use Facebook, don’t wait to change your privacy settings

In a privacy policy change announced recently and effective on December 9, social networking supersite Facebook made significant changes to the default privacy settings for all Facebook users. In some cases the default settings announced disclose…

Data loss lessons from TSA disclosure

As reported on Wednesday in the Washington Post and elsewhere, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) inadvertently disclosed sensitive information about its airline passenger screening practices by posting a document containing this information online. The mistakes involved…

Sometimes a breach is data theft, sometimes it’s business as usual

Among the latest unauthorized disclosures of personal information making headlines is the admission last week by T-Mobile that thousands of its British customers had essentially become pawns in a “black market” for mobile service subscriber information…

Security and privacy going global

Members of Congress show no signs of letting up in efforts to revise or reform or extend various information security regulations. Ideas about updating FISMA — particularly from Senators like Olympia Snowe, John Rockefeller, and Tom…

Is de-identification of personal records possible?

Last month Harvard Magazine ran a fantastic article on privacy in the current era, focusing in particular on the work of researcher Latanya Sweeney, who has demonstrated a somewhat alarming ability take personal data that has…

Not everyone agrees what is (and isn’t) personal information

Deliberations among European Union member countries made privacy headlines in early 2008 when Peter Scharr, data protection commissioner for Germany and leader of a group of EU data privacy regulators, while speaking at a European Parliament…