Author Archive for daniel-solove

Introducing Guest Blogger Anita Krishnakumar

posted by Daniel Solove

I’m delighted to introduce Professor Anita S. Krishnakumar (St. John’s School of Law), who will be joining us for a reprise guest visit for the next month.

Anita teaches Legislation, Introduction to Law, and Trusts and Estates. She received her J.D. from Yale University, and her B.A. from the Stanford University. Before joining the St. John’s faculty in 2006, she visited at Touro Law School from 2004-06. Prior to entering law teaching, she worked as an associate in the appellate litigation group at Mayer, Brown, Rowe & Maw, and as a litigation associate at Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen, & Hamilton. Before that, she was as a law clerk for Jose A. Cabranes of the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals.

In 2009, she received a Dean’s Teaching Award, based on student evaluations.

Anita’s current research focuses on legislative solutions to legislative process dysfunctions, recent trends in the Supreme Court’s statutory interpretation cases, judicial treatment of political parties, and election law.

Her publications include:

* The Hidden Legacy of Holy Trinity Church: The Unique National Institution Canon, 51 William & Mary L. Rev. (forthcoming 2009)

* Representation Reinforcement: A Legislative Solution to a Legislative Process Problem, 46 Harv. J. on Legisl. 1 (2009)

* Towards A Madisonian “Interest-Group” Approach To Lobbying Regulation, 58 Alabama Law Review 513 (2007)

  November 1, 2009 at 8:21 am   Posted in: Administrative Announcements   Print This Post   2 Comments

Consumer Attitudes on Privacy and Behavioral Marketing

posted by Daniel Solove

Joseph Turow, Chris Hoofnagle, Jennifer King, Amy Bleakley, and Michael Hennessy have just issued a very interesting consumer survey on privacy and behavioral marketing entitled, Americans Reject Tailored Advertising and Three Activities that Enable It.

Some of the survey’s findings:

* Even when they are told that the act of following them on websites will take place anonymously, Americans’ aversion to it remains: 68% “definitely” would not allow it, and 19% would “probably” not allow it. (p. 2)

* 69% of American adults feel there should be a law that gives people the right to know everything that a website knows about them. (p. 2)

* 92% agree there should be a law that requires “websites and advertising companies to delete all stored information about an individual, if requested to do so.” (p. 2)

* Signaling frustration over privacy issues, Americans are inclined toward strict punishment of information offenders. 70% suggest that a company should be fined more than the maximum amount suggested ($2,500) “if a company purchases or uses someone’s information illegally.” (p. 3)

* Our survey did find that younger American adults are less likely to say no to tailored advertising than are older ones. Still, more than half (55%) of 18- 24 year-olds do not want tailored advertising. And contrary to consistent assertions of marketers, young adults have as strong an aversion to being followed across websites and offline (for example, in stores) as do older adults. 86% of young adults say they don’t want tailored advertising if it is the result of following their behavior on websites other than one they are visiting, and 90% of them reject it if it is the result of following what they do offline. (p. 2)

These are just a few of the many findings in this fascinating survey.  The New York Times has coverage of the survey here.

  September 29, 2009 at 6:28 pm   Posted in: Privacy, Privacy (Consumer Privacy)   Print This Post   No Comments

Facebook Settles Beacon Lawsuit

posted by Daniel Solove

A while ago, I wrote a lot about Facebook’s Beacon on this blog:

* The Facebook-Fandango Connection: Invasion of Privacy?

* Facebook’s Beacon: News Feeds All Over Again?

* Facebook and the Appropriation of Name or Likeness Tort

* The New Facebook Ads — Starring You: Another Privacy Debacle?

* Facebook — the New DoubleClick?

* Facebook Listens and Responds

* Facebook’s Beacon, Blockbuster, and the Video Privacy Protection Act

A class action suit was initiated against Facebook, and recently, a settlement agreement has been reached.  According to the WSJ:

Facebook Inc. said Friday it settled a class-action lawsuit related to its Beacon Web product, a controversial service that displayed actions that users took on other Web sites back on Facebook.

As part of the settlement, which is pending approval in the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California, the social-network concern will shut down the Beacon service, which it has been phasing out but which is still being used by a small number of Web sites, according to a Facebook spokesman.

The company will also pay $9.5 million to create a foundation to fund products that promote online privacy, safety and security, the spokesman said. The settlement was submitted to the court late Friday evening.

  September 21, 2009 at 10:00 pm   Posted in: Privacy, Privacy (Consumer Privacy), Social Network Websites, Web 2.0   Print This Post   No Comments

Understanding Privacy in Paperback

posted by Daniel Solove

I’m pleased to announce that my book, Understanding Privacy, has just come out in paperback from Harvard University Press, with a price that’s much more reasonable and affordable than the hardcover.

Understanding Privacy offers a comprehensive overview of the many difficulties involved in discussions of privacy. Drawing from a broad array of interdisciplinary sources, I set forth a framework for understanding privacy that provides clear practical guidance for engaging with privacy issues.

  September 14, 2009 at 7:36 am   Posted in: Articles and Books, Book Reviews, Privacy, Privacy (Consumer Privacy), Privacy (Electronic Surveillance), Privacy (Gossip & Shaming), Privacy (ID Theft), Privacy (Law Enforcement), Privacy (Medical), Privacy (National Security)   Print This Post   No Comments

The Art of Renaming

posted by Daniel Solove

If people don’t like something, the solution is often as simple as a name change.  Consider fish.  Some of the most popular fish today are renamed versions of less desirable fish.  Orange Roughy used to be called slimehead.  Chilean sea bass used to be called toothfish.  Monkfish used to be goosefish. The result of these name changes has been a dramatic increase in popularity, so much so that many renamed fish are now overfished and endangered.

The renaming trend is now spreading to academic courses. From the Boston Globe:

Boston College German studies professor Michael Resler went searching for a way to boost flagging interest in his “German Literature of the High Middle Ages’’ class a few years ago, and settled on the idea of simply giving the course a sexier name. The resulting “Knights, Castles, and Dragons’’ nearly tripled enrollment.

Resler then replaced his class on “The Songs of Walter von der Vogelweide,’’ a great German lyric poet, with “Passion, Politics, and Poetry in the Middle Ages.’’ Again, enrollment swelled.

“I suppose the moral of the story is that we live in an age where everything has to be marketed in order to find a willing audience,’’ Resler mused.

Maybe it’s time to rename law school classes:

Torts –> Crashes and Accidents

Criminal Law –> Murder Most Foul and Other Dastardly Crimes

Trusts & Estates –> Dead Hands: Power After Death

Corporate Law –> Gold and Parachutes

Property –> The Story of a Whale and a Fox

Hat tip: Inside Higher Ed

  September 8, 2009 at 7:32 am   Posted in: Culture, Education, Humor, Law School, Law School (Teaching)   Print This Post   10 Comments

Breaching a Child’s Confidentiality

posted by Daniel Solove

Over at the NYT blog is an interesting story about a British writer (Julie Myerson) who has published a memoir about her son’s drug addiction (The Lost Child).  Her 20-year old son has criticized the publication of the book. According to the Telegraph (UK):

The 20-year-old said: “What she has done has taken the very worst years of my life and cleverly blended it into a work of art, and that to me is obscene.

“I was only 17, I was a confused teenager, I was too young really to know who I was or what was happening.

“What she describes in her book are a series of incidents, it’s not who I am and I find it very sad that she feels the need to tar me with the ‘drug addict’ brush.

“She’s been writing about me since I was two, and, quite frankly, I’m not surprised by anything she does any more.

The NYT Blog asks:

Is it inappropriate and even harmful to expose the private lives of minor children, in particular? What privacy lines should be observed, if any, in writing about family members and others?

It contains responses from four people, Alison Gopnik (a psychology professor), David Matthews (author), Melanie Gideon (author0, and Michael Greenberg (author).  For example, Author David Matthews writes:

Nothing is off limits as far as I’m concerned. Whether an author wants to risk fraying familial and social ties in the pursuit of the truth (as they see it) is a question left up to the writer.

Matthews’ response strikes me as rather extreme. In Britain, family members owe each other duties to keep private information confidential. In the US, the breach of confidentiality tort applies to doctors, lawyers, and others, but hasn’t been extended to friends and family.  Perhaps it should be.

According to the Telegraph article, Myerson’s son said:

“I even consulted a lawyer to try to stop it, but was told there wasn’t much I could do, so I made her take out the part where she said I was selling drugs to my 12-year-old brother, which was one of her fantasies.

I’m surprised that he was advised the law didn’t protect him, since the book was published in Britain and he’d likely have a decent case under British precedent.

The Myerson case is increasingly becoming more common.  Numerous bloggers are chronicling the lives of their children online, posting photos and a day-by-day account of their lives.  What happens when these children grow up and resent having their entire childhood permanently recorded for the world to see?

Should family members owe each other a duty of confidentiality?  Should parents write about a child’s life without that child’s consent?

Hat tip: PogoWasRight

  September 1, 2009 at 7:40 am   Posted in: Family Law, Privacy, Privacy (Gossip & Shaming), Tort Law   Print This Post   8 Comments

Introducing Guest Blogger Jonathan Siegel

posted by Daniel Solove

I’m delighted to introduce Professor Jonathan Siegel, who will be guest blogging with us this month.  Jonathan is my colleague at George Washington University Law School.  He is a graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School. He clerked for Chief Judge Patricia M. Wald of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, after which he served for four years as an attorney on the Appellate Staff of the Civil Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. He became a professor at George Washington Law School in 1995 and was named the Kahan Research Professor in 2008.

Jon’s scholarship focuses on administrative law, federal courts, statutory interpretation, and lawsuits against governments. When not a guest on Concurring Opinions, he blogs at Law Prof on the Loose.

Some of his recent and/or favorite publications include:

* A Theory of Justiciability, 86 Tex. L. Rev. 73 (2007)

* The Polymorphic Principle and the Judicial Role in Statutory Interpretation, 84 Tex. L. Rev. 339 (2005)

* The Use of Legislative History in a System of Separated Powers, 53 Vand. L. Rev. 1457 (2000)

* The Hidden Source of Congress’s Power to Abrogate State Sovereign Immunity, 73 Tex. L. Rev. 539 (1995)

  August 31, 2009 at 11:30 am   Posted in: Administrative Announcements   Print This Post   No Comments

Introducing Guest Blogger John Ip

posted by Daniel Solove

I’m delighted to introduce Professor John Ip (University of Auckland Faculty of Law), who will be guest blogging with us this month.

John joined the law faculty of the University of Auckland, New Zealand, in 2005, and specializes in comparative counterterrorism law, and criminal justice. Prior to arriving in Auckland, he worked on Guantánamo Bay and death penalty litigation at an NGO in the United States, and was a Judges’ Clerk at the Auckland High Court. John is a graduate of the University of Auckland and Columbia University Law School.

Some of his publications include:

* Two Narratives of Torture, 7 Northwestern University Journal of International Human Rights 35 (2009)

* The Rise and Spread of the Special Advocate, Public Law 171 (Winter 2008)

* Crime, Criminal Justice and the Media, in Criminal Justice in New Zealand (Tolmie & Brookbanks eds. 2007)

* Comparative Perspectives on the Detention of Terrorist Suspects, 16 Transnational Law and Contemporary Problems 773 (2007)

* Debating New Zealand’s Hate Crime Legislation: Theory and Practice, 21 New Zealand Universities Law Review 575 (2005)

  August 31, 2009 at 11:25 am   Posted in: Administrative Announcements   Print This Post   No Comments

Fellowships for Aspiring Law Professors 2009-2010

posted by Daniel Solove

Over at TaxProf, Paul Caron has posted an updated list of fellowships and visiting associate professorships for aspiring law professors.

  August 31, 2009 at 11:24 am   Posted in: Law School, Law School (Hiring & Laterals)   Print This Post   No Comments

The Revenge of College Gossip Websites

posted by Daniel Solove

A while ago, the notorious college gossip website, Juicy Campus, bit the dust.  But according to an article by Jeffrey Young in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

“This is the new JuicyCampus,” says a note at Campus Gossip, which boasts campus-specific message boards for hundreds of colleges and encourages anonymous and racy barbs such as “These Fellas got herpes,” with a list of names attached. Going even further than its predecessor, there’s also a photo section where students can post embarrassing pictures and videos of others.

The site is planning a back-to-school marketing push, including a happy hour near Arizona State University where a rap artist named Sabotage will perform a song about the pleasures of campus gossip.

Another site, CollegeACB (the letters stand for Anonymous Confession Board), paid the defunct JuicyCampus $10,000 to redirect visitors from its Web address to CollegeACB.

For those who want a first-hand look at these sites, the Campus Gossip site is here and the CollegeACB site is here.  I’m quoted in the article, as is co-blogger Danielle Citron:

Internet shaming creates an indelible blemish on a person’s identity,” wrote Daniel J. Solove, a professor of law at George Washington University, in his 2007 book, The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet (Yale University Press). “It’s similar to being forced to wear a digital scarlet letter or being branded or tattooed. People acquire permanent digital baggage. They are unable to escape their past, which is forever etched into Google’s memory.” . . . .

“I don’t see why it has to be that way,” the law professor told me in a recent interview. “Just like when you drive, it’s not a free-for-all,” he added, equating the current laws governing online forums to a road without traffic lights or stop signs. “It’s like if we looked at the roads and said, There’s just nothing to be done—let’s just abolish all rules of the road.” . . . .

Danielle Citron, a law professor at the University of Maryland at Baltimore, said she hoped that stamping out harassment on campus-gossip Web sites would be considered a matter of civil rights.

She makes the case in an article published in the Michigan Law Review this year called “Law’s Expressive Value in Combating Cyber Gender Harassment.” In it, she argues that law-enforcement officials fail to take seriously complaints about online anonymous comments, and that using “civil-rights remedies” may be the most effective way to pursue such acts.

“Women should not have to wait until cyberharassment fulminates into physical violence for law enforcement to address it,” she wrote. “A civil-rights agenda … would demonstrate that the Internet is not the lawless Wild West, just as court settlements and state legislation made clear that the home does not insulate abusing husbands from societal intervention.”

  August 31, 2009 at 9:51 am   Posted in: Anonymity, Privacy, Privacy (Gossip & Shaming), Social Network Websites, Web 2.0   Print This Post   2 Comments

Lori Drew Case Decided

posted by Daniel Solove

The Lori Drew case has finally been decided.  Background about the case is here.  In previous posts (here and here), I argued that the CFAA should be held to be unconstitutionally vague.

In an opinion released on August 28, Judge George Wu struck down, on unconstitutional vagueness grounds, the prosecution’s attempt to enforce violations of website terms of service as crimes under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA):

[I]f any conscious breach of a website’s terms of service is held to be sufficient by itself to constitute intentionally accessing a computer without authorization or in excess of authorization, the result will be that section 1030(a)(2)(C) becomes a law “that affords too much discretion to the police and too little notice to citizens who wish to use the [Internet].” City of Chicago [v. Morales], 527 U.S. [41] at 64 [(1999)].

Congratulations to Orin Kerr, who assisted in the defense, and who is cited numerous times throughout the court’s opinion.

  August 29, 2009 at 10:18 pm   Posted in: Anonymity, Privacy, Privacy (Electronic Surveillance), Privacy (Gossip & Shaming), Web 2.0   Print This Post   No Comments

Interview on Internet Anonymity on Above the Law

posted by Daniel Solove

Over at Above the Law, Kashmir Hill has posted a Q&A with me about the “Skanks in NYC” blogger case.  She also discusses with me how and why I became interested in privacy law.

  August 25, 2009 at 3:06 pm   Posted in: Privacy, Privacy (Gossip & Shaming), Social Network Websites, Tort Law, Web 2.0   Print This Post   No Comments

Can You Be Sued for Unmasking an Anonymous Blogger?

posted by Daniel Solove

A model named Liskula Cohen was being attacked on a blog called Skanks in NYC.  The author of the Skanks blog was anonymous.  Kashmir Hill reports:

Cohen started pursuing the defamation suit against the anonymous ‘Skanks’ blogger in January after discovering the site, on which the blogger called Cohen a skank, a ho, and an old hag, among other nasty things, and posted photos of her, taken from various websites. Since Cohen needed the identity of the blogger in order to file the lawsuit against her, a judge in Manhattan granted Cohen’s request to force Google to reveal the e-mail address and IP address of the alleged defamer.

Cohen has since dropped her $3 million lawsuit.  The unmasked blogger — Rosemary Port — plans to sue Google for $15 million for breaching its fiduciary duty to defend her anonymity.

Over at CyberSLAPP, a website maintained by EFF (disclosure: I’m on EFF’s advisory board), ACLU, CDT, EPIC, and Public Citizen, they have posted documents from the case, including the court’s order to Google to unmask the author of Skanks.

CyberSLAPP seeks to combat frivolous lawsuits to reveal another’s identity:

CyberSLAPP cases typically involve a person who has posted anonymous criticisms of a corporation or public figure on the Internet. The target of the criticism then files a frivolous lawsuit just so they can issue a subpoena to the Web site or Internet Service Provider (ISP) involved, discover the identity of their anonymous critic, and intimidate or silence them.

The Skanks in NYC raises a lot of interesting issues.  I’ll tackle a few in this post.

1.Was Cohen’s lawsuit frivolous? Cohen might have a decent defamation lawsuit, but she subsequently dropped it when she found out Cohen’s identity.  This behavior indicates she was using the lawsuit only to unmask the blogger.  I agree with CyberSLAPP that such a practice should be restricted.

Read the rest of this post »

  August 25, 2009 at 7:04 am   Posted in: Anonymity, Privacy, Privacy (Gossip & Shaming), Social Network Websites, Tort Law, Web 2.0   Print This Post   23 Comments

Employers Researching Applicants Online

posted by Daniel Solove

Over at the New York Times Bits Blog, Jenna Wortham writes:

According to a new study conducted by Harris Interactive for CareerBuilder.com, 45 percent of employers questioned are using social networks to screen job candidates — more than double from a year earlier, when a similar survey found that just 22 percent of supervisors were researching potential hires on social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn.

The study, which questioned 2,667 managers and human resource workers, found that 35 percent of employers decided not to offer a job to a candidate based on the content uncovered on a social networking site. (The survey has no margin of sampling error because it was not drawn from a representative nationwide sample but rather from volunteer participants.)

According to the report, most employers did their research on applicants by using Facebook.  I wonder whether they respected the applicants’ privacy settings.  If the applicants limited the access of their profile to a select group of friends, and the employer accessed that profile, then the employer might find themselves at odds with the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act — with possible criminal penalties!

What leads to job rejections?  Photos!  Photos involving nudity, drink, and drugs are the most frequent job killers.

As I discuss in The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet, people must learn to be more careful about what they post about themselves and others or else they will face serious consequences and lost opportunities.

In an earlier post regarding college admissions officers researching applicants online, I argued that most lack guidelines for how they conduct such research and for how they use the information they find.  These questions also pertain to employers:

* Should such information be used? When?

* How heavily should it be relied upon?

* What kinds of things should negatively impact an applicant? Information about sex life? Drug use? Drinking? Bad behavior?

* What steps should be taken to make sure that the information was accurate?

* Should a distinction be made between information that people post about themselves and information that others have posted about them, perhaps invading their privacy without their consent?

* What steps should be taken to make sure that the information used in fact relates to the applicant and not to somebody else with the same name?

* Should people be notified that information online was used against them and be given an opportunity to be heard to explain it?

  August 20, 2009 at 6:37 pm   Posted in: Employment Law, Privacy, Privacy (Gossip & Shaming), Social Network Websites, Web 2.0   Print This Post   No Comments

Concurring Opinions Book Reviews

posted by Daniel Solove

Sandy Levinson has a thoughtful new essay lamenting the dwindling number of book reviews of books about the law — The Vanishing Book Review in Student Edited Law Reviews and Potential Responses, 87 Tex. L. Rev. 1205 (2009).  He discusses how the Michigan Law Review used to run 30 to 40 book reviews in its book review issue but now is running only about 10 to 15. He notes that among the top 20 law reviews, in 1987-88, they published about 125 reviews; in 2007-08, they published only 42 reviews.

Brian Leiter notes, in the title of his post about Levinson’s article, that “academic law needs more fora for serious book reviews.”

Beyond law reviews, the number of book reviews in newspapers is rapidly diminishing.

This is why we’re starting a new project at Concurring Opinions — we’ll serve as a forum for book reviews.

We will accept submissions from our readers — law professors, lawyers, law students, and academics in other fields are welcome to submit reviews.

The reviews we envision would be approximately the length of a New York Times book review — somewhere between 500 to 2000 words.

We will try to accept as many reviews as we can, but we will exercise editorial discretion if we think a review isn’t appropriate for our blog.  We’re aiming for serious reviews.

If you’re interested in writing a book review for us, we recommend that you first email us with a brief description of what book you’d like to review and your background, as we don’t want you to go through the work of writing a review only for us to think it doesn’t fit with our blog.  Emailing us in advance won’t guarantee acceptance, but we would hope to give you a good indication of whether we’d be interested in your review.

We believe that there’s a need for serious yet short book reviews, ones that aren’t as long as those published in law reviews.  That’s why we’re starting this project.  We expect it to be ongoing, so if you’ve read a law-related book recently and want a forum to publish your views about it, please think about doing a review for us.

If you publish a book review here, you keep copyright in your work, so you can use it, publish it, and disseminate it later in whatever way you desire.

So please email us if you’re interested.

  August 18, 2009 at 7:21 pm   Posted in: Administrative Announcements, Articles and Books, Book Reviews, Law School (Law Reviews), Law School (Scholarship)   Print This Post   One Comment

Great Podcast on Shepard Fairey v. The Associated Press

posted by Daniel Solove

Professor Doug Lichtman (UCLA Law School) has a terrific new episode of IP Colloquium.  The show involves a discussion of Shepard Fairey v. The Associated Press, a case involving a copyright dispute about the HOPE poster of Barack Obama.  I blogged about the case here and here.

Doug was able to get Mark Lemley (Shepard Fairey’s lawyer) and also Dale Cendali (the attorney who represents the AP) to come on the show and talk with him about the case.  This was the first time the AP spoke publicly about the case in the news media.  Also on the show is Ken Richieri, General Counsel at the New York Times.

Lawyers who listen to IP Colloquium podcasts can earn free CLE credit.

The podcast is well worth a listen — a great sophisticated discussion of fair use.

  August 11, 2009 at 7:52 pm   Posted in: Intellectual Property   Print This Post   5 Comments

Too Much Discretion

posted by Daniel Solove

In what country can people routinely be arrested (and sometimes imprisoned for a significant amount of time) based on the whim of a police officer or a judge?  Sounds like something that would happen in a totalitarian state, but it’s the way things work in the United States.

In the frenzy of news coverage of the recent incident involving the arrest of Professor Henry Louis Gates in his home, only a small amount of attention was devoted to the issue of police discretion.  Gates was arrested on a charge of disorderly conduct, which was later dropped. Charges such as disorderly conduct basically give the police an enormously broad range of discretion to arrest anyone for nearly any reason.

President Obama said that the police “acted stupidly,” and he was roundly castigated for making this statement.  He misspoke, not because he criticized the police but because the problem wasn’t that the police acted stupidly — it was that they had a tremendous amount of discretion to arrest.

Should the police have so much power to arrest a person?  With vague charges such as disorderly conduct, the police can essentially arrest a person who says things they don’t like or threatens to complain about them.

And consider this story, from the Chicago Tribune:

Clifton Williams arrived at the Will County Courthouse in Joliet and sat in the fourth-floor courtroom where his cousin was pleading guilty to a felony drug charge.

As Circuit Judge Daniel Rozak handed down the cousin’s sentence — 2 years’ probation — Williams, 33, stretched and let out a very ill-timed yawn.

Williams’ sentence? Six months in jail — the maximum penalty for criminal contempt without a jury trial. The Richton Park man was locked up July 23 and will serve at least 21 days. . . .

A Tribune review of a decade’s worth of contempt-of-court charges reveals that Rozak jails people — typically spectators whose cell phones go off or who scream or shout profanity during sentencing — at a far higher rate than any other judge in the county. There are now 30 judges in the 12th Judicial Circuit, but since 1999, Rozak has brought more than a third of all the contempt charges, records show.

Apparently, the yawn was very loud and disruptive, but jail?  Six months?  Why not simply kick him out of the courtroom?

Judges have tremendous discretion to issue contempt charges.  It is way too much, and there are few limits to reign judges in.  The article continues:

Read the rest of this post »

  August 10, 2009 at 10:09 pm   Posted in: Constitutional Law, Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure   Print This Post   6 Comments

Introducing Guest Blogger Alice Ristroph

posted by Daniel Solove

I’m very pleased to announce the reprise guest visit of Professor Alice Ristroph.

Alice is visiting Georgetown from Seton Hall University School of Law.  She teaches and writes in the fields of criminal law and procedure, constitutional law, and political theory. She is working on a book about the legal regulation of violence.

Alice’s most recent papers are forthcoming in Constitutional Commentary, Florida Law Review, and Yale Law Journal. During the 2007-2008 academic year, Alice was  a Faculty Fellow in Ethics at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, Harvard University. She joined the Seton Hall faculty in 2008 after serving as Associate Professor at the University of Utah, S.J. Quinney College of Law.

Before she began law teaching, Alice was an associate in the litigation department of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison in New York City.  She has a J.D. and Ph.D. in political theory from Harvard University.

Her recently published articles include:

* Respect and Resistance in Punishment Theory, 97 Cal. L. Rev. 601 (2009)

* State Intentions and the Law of Punishment, 98 J. Crim. L. & Criminology 1353 (2008)

  August 2, 2009 at 7:35 pm   Posted in: Administrative Announcements   Print This Post   One Comment

Predicting Social Security Numbers from Public Data

posted by Daniel Solove

Alessandro Acquisti and Ralph Gross have recently published their provocative article, Predicting Social Security Numbers from Public Data in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  According to the abstract:

Information about an individual’s place and date of birth can be exploited to predict his or her Social Security number (SSN). Using only publicly available information, we observed a correlation between individuals’ SSNs and their birth data and found that for younger cohorts the correlation allows statistical inference of private SSNs. The inferences are made possible by the public availability of the Social Security Administration’s Death Master File and the widespread accessibility of personal information from multiple sources, such as data brokers or profiles on social networking sites. Our results highlight the unexpected privacy consequences of the complex interactions among multiple data sources in modern information economies and quantify privacy risks associated with information revelation in public forums.

Acquisti and Gross’s study has generated significant media attention.  Here’s an article by Bob Sullivan for MSNBC and by Hadley Leggett for Wired.  As Sullivan writes:

The two say they can guess the first 5 digits of the Social Security number of anyone born after 1988 within two guesses, knowing only birth date and location. The last four digits, while harder to guess, can be had within a few hundred guesses in many situations — a trivial hurdle for criminals using automated tools.

SSNs are currently used by numerous businesses and organizations to allow access to accounts – they function as a kind of password. They are also used to verify identity when people sign up for a new credit card or other account. They are thus a very useful tool for identity thieves and fraudsters who want to impersonate people to improperly access their accounts or obtain credit cards in their name.

The current focus of policymakers has been to provide better protections against the disclosure of SSNs.

Acquisti and Gross’s paper provides a powerful demonstration that protecting against the disclosure of SSNs is not providing enough protection to consumers.  The article shows that no matter how much protection against the disclosure of SSNs, SSNs can be determined with other public information.

Congress or the FTC should prohibit companies from using SSNs as a means to verify identity. Companies, organizations, and government entities should be prohibited from using SSNs as a means of verifying identity to provide access to accounts or to create new accounts. Merely protecting against the disclosure of SSNs is insufficient since Acquisti and Gross demonstrate they can readily be predicted.

The government and businesses are at fault here.  Too many business and organizations use the SSN improperly as a means to verify identity.  And the government is at fault for creating the SSN and allowing it to be used improperly in ways that harm people.

  July 6, 2009 at 8:41 pm   Posted in: Articles and Books, Privacy, Privacy (Consumer Privacy), Privacy (ID Theft)   Print This Post   2 Comments

Introducing Guest Blogger Elizabeth Nowicki

posted by Daniel Solove

I am very pleased to announce that Elizabeth Nowicki will be joining us again as a guest blogger this month.

When Elizabeth was last with us in 2006, she was on the faculty at Richmond and visiting away at Cornell. Now she is tenured at Tulane and visiting at Boston University. Prior to entering the academy, she clerked for Judge Jack Weinstein (EDNY) and Judge James Oakes (2d Cir.), she worked on Regulation FD at the Securities and Exchange Commission, and she was an associate at Sullivan & Cromwell.

Elizabeth teaches Corporations, Mergers & Acquisitions, Securities Regulation, Deals, and related courses, and her writing has focused on corporate governance, securities fraud, ethics, apologies, mergers, and deals. She is currently the Chair of the AALS Section on Women in Legal Education, and she is an officer in the AALS Section on Securities Regulation.

Elizabeth has been an expert witness on a host of matters, including analyst fraud and stock option backdating cases, and Elizabeth is a regular in the media.

Some of her recent publications include:
* Director Inattention and Director Protection Under Delaware General Corporations Law Section 102(b)(7): A Proposal for Legislative Reform, 33 Del. J. Corp. L. 695 (2008)
* Not in Good Faith, 60 SMU L. Rev. 441 (2007)
* A Director’s Good Faith, 55 Buff. L. Rev. 457 (2007)

  July 5, 2009 at 11:26 am   Posted in: Administrative Announcements   Print This Post   No Comments

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