But that’s not what I read in the comments of his I saw. My take is that he had said he wasn’t concerned about having his personal data available on-line — until after the professor’s class looked it up (without revealing the actual data.) So, yes, I think Scalia’s reaction was hypocritical.

But forget Antonin Scalia. Let’s consider how his wife feels about having her private e-mail address potentially subject to torrents of spam. I don’t think it’s a stretch to guess she was not pleased.

Right now they’re written as if data-mining doesn’t exist. And our supreme court justices aren’t aware of how prevalent this stuff is, on EVERY individual. Even if releasing this information was ‘in poor judgment,’ the point is that there are companies compiling this data for their own use, that won’t release it (and therefore, I assume, he would assume they suffered no lapse in judgment).

It’s a big deal, and needs to be addressed.

Duh, he did. The people above who said he should do that obviously haven’t read the actual article and were probably just linking here thru some wrongwing website.

My suggestion? Next time do your own homework.

BTW, anytime you happen upon a website, whether intentional or not, they have your IP, your operating system, your screen dimensions, and your general location.

With that and $25 I can probably get your credit report, address(es), license plate(s) and criminal history, (including cases not yet adjudicated).

p.s. Prof. Reidenberg did do the responsible thing, he put the info behind a password protected firewall. Scalia and the people who are decrying the Prof’s ethics should also realize that the exercise was conducted responsibly.

BTW, if 20 year olds can do this, imagine what a 14 year old can do.

IANAL, so I daresay that definition’s holier than Jesus’ sandals, but if “online stalking” can be defined legally, then so can this.

The practical issue is that due to the availability of personal info on the net, shouldn’t we have some preemptive protections in place?

As with anything, it’s a matter of money now and liability (money later). Anyone (read: businesses) requiring your personal info would need to spend more to keep it safeguarded and at the same time be MORE exposed to liability if their new-and-expensive data security measures failed.

So Judge Scalia should have retired with the Bush administration if he had his words thrown back at him and made to look stupid. His irritation is hypocritical and embarrassing to this citizen whose nation has placed him in its highest court. Maybe Carrot Top should be on the bench, so we can have MORE embarrassing and not-funny comedy.

So the question is, “is this unethical enough to make a law?” I suspect that the trouble with it is, like Scalia’s reaction indicates, that if you take it apart and try to compare privacy, public data, and aggregation, there’s nothing for a law to hook into — nothing that can clearly be identified as the kernel of the illegal part.

I think the deeper issue is that Americans (including me, so I’ll use “we”) live in a country that is both open-minded and puritanical. On the one hand, we can freely amass wealth, own guns, and publicly agree or disagree with our leaders. On the other hand, if it were publicly revealed that some teacher purchased bondage gear for their private (and, for the sake of argument, legal) sex life, they’d be ostracized and possibly fired.

I favor expanding the open-minded world and don’t expend much effort keeping my 3-sigma behaviors private (that is, the things I do that are shared by a small percentage of the population). The cost today is that I’m prevented from holding public office or working for companies who meddle in the private lives of their employees. I’d rather see the tsk-tsk-er’s of that fictional teacher be told, “what does that have to do with their ability to teach?”

Unfortunately, because this dichotomy exists, there’s a pervasive belief that those who demand privacy are doing something wrong. Until that kind of thinking congeals one way or another, there’s no way to even suggest a law about it that anyone would reasonably follow.

Why do we have laws against murder? Surely decent and civilized people, corporations, and government entities wouldn’t indulge in such scurrilous behavior, without needing it enshrined in the law.

I do think the element of hypocrisy makes the lesson more effective, and more memorable. I would note that Professor Reidenberg earlier assigned a similar class exercise on himself–a point neither Scalia nor several of the commentators above seem to recognize. I think that a similar exercise on an unconsenting third party who favors more robust privacy protections (whether legislatively or by constitutional or statutory interpretation) would be pedagogically less apt and ethically more troubling. It is not unknown for Scalia to target litigants and attorneys who have invited, or brought, trouble on themselves through their own words or actions.

My original comment follows:

This is far from the first time that governmental leaders have shown how out of touch they are with the realities of everyday life.

Prof. Reidenberg has effectively demonstrated, in a way that will be especially memorable for his class, the legal community reading this report, and, I hope, the broader public—not to speak of Justice Scalia and his judicial and legislative colleagues—just how easy it is to collect, and potentially to disseminate, such “private” information. While Prof. Reidenberg and his class showed appropriate restraint (to the best of our knowledge) on further use of the data they collected, there are many others capable of collecting such information for nefarious rather than instructive purposes.

(BTW, I speak as a law professor who occasionally taught privacy law, and some of whose students provided me, as an end-of-term gift, with a review of material on me they collected on the web. Damn that speeding ticket 15 years ago—sure glad I paid it on time.)

Personally, I think it is a significant public service to bring home to those insensitive to the need for improved protections of privacy and in a position to affect further developments of the law a more visceral sense of the nature of the intrusions (indeed, personal violations) now so easy to accomplish, and indeed, so common in our society. Justice Scalia has a fine sense of humor when the jokes are on others—apparently he has a harder time laughing at himself—and learning the appropriate lessons. Including that line about the corruptions of power…to which I might add, excessive insulation from the common travails of life.

Bravo to Prof. Reidenberg.