Articles Posted in Privacy

The Justia Dockets & Filings website offers attorneys, journalists, litigants, and legal researchers a simple tool for discovering and tracking litigation in the various federal courts. I find the website to be absolutely indispensable for tracking who is suing and who is being sued.

For example, I subscribe to the following RSS feeds to track lawsuits involving technology companies, such as Google, Facebook and Apple. You will find a routine stream of complaints over privacy, patents and petty consumer grievances. For the latter group, I sometimes wonder about the plaintiffs who cannot resolve minor disputes without resorting to a federal class action. In this day and age of increasing transparency in the legal system, are these plaintiffs giving sufficient forethought to how a potential future employer may view their degree of litigiousness over seemingly trivial disputes?

We’ve all used work e-mail for personal stuff, haven’t we? You know: connecting with college friends, organizing family reunions, and making appointments with our lawyers, right?

Wait a second….what was that last thing?

If you live in Northern California, take note: a state appeals court just ruled that an employee’s attorney-client e-mails that use his employer’s company e-mail account are not protected, confidential communications.

On Monday, Gabriel Saldana offered some social media privacy tips for stalking victims. His advice about quitting Facebook is on the mark, and not just for people victimized by stalkers. While Facebook is a popular gateway into a virtual world of friends, status updates, and likes, it may also serve as a social engineering Trojan horse for those seeking to do you harm.

Consider the following security questions that banks and other financial institutions often use to safeguard your account?

Last month, President Barack Obama proclaimed January 2011 as National Stalking Awareness Month to raise awareness of stalking and to offer support to stalking victims and survivors. While stalking is a crime in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, many people underestimate its effects and consequences. President Obama acknowledged our heightened awareness of stalking and its prevalence since Congress passed the Violence Against Women Act in 1994; however, he noted that such criminal behavior is still often treated as being harmless.

The National Stalking Awareness Month website provides educational material for the public and resources for stalking victims. The website notes that unlike other crimes, stalking is not a single, easily identifiable crime but a series of acts—a course of conduct directed at a specific person that would cause him or her fear. Often, stalking behaviors may be understandable only to the stalker and victim, and appear harmless to others not familiar with the situation, making it difficult to recognize, investigate and prosecute.

A hat-tip to Mary Minow for alerting readers via her Library Law Blog post last week that Representative Mike Rogers of Michigan introduced HR 67 on January 5, 2011 to extend the PATRIOT Act yet another year to February, 2012. Given the short amount of time available to renew the Act and that the renewal period is only a year, most feel the extension is likely to happen without much notice or pushback. Congress passed the original PATRIOT Act in response to the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Much has been written about its provisions which, among other things, allow expanded use of National Security Letters, permitting the FBI to search telephone, email and other electronic records without first securing a court order. In particular, within the library community, alarm has been raised by provisions which grant law enforcement access to library patron records.

Patriot Act Resources

• H.R.3162 – USA PATRIOT Act, Original 2001 Bill, 107th Congress

British authorities arrested Wiikileaks founder and editor-in-chief Julian Assange on Tuesday based upon a Swedish warrant charging him with sexually assaulting two women there over the summer.

Assange’s arrest, along with decisions by technology companies, finance companies, and banks to distance themselves from the document-leaking web site he founded, have placed Wikileaks in a difficult position. Will the site remain under constant threat of being booted off the web?

Probably, but that just doesn’t appear likely to happen. Once Wikileaks started sharing documents with journalists around the world, it guaranteed that removing the diplomatic cables would be impossible.

Amazon evicted Wikileaks from the company’s servers, telling the group to look for hosting space elsewhere.

These presents aren’t going to wrap themselves, folks.

You’re at work, but you’re on Amazon and Overstock searching for deals, right? It’s Cyber Monday–the online equivalent of Black Friday, where the web stores are jammed with consumers distracted at work. Amazon and Target even have special sales on this day and advertise with the adwords “Cyber Monday.”

I guess I’m a scrooge [ed: Ebeneezer Scrooge was a banker, not a lawyer], but the first thing I thought of was how much tax money the state governments were going to get screwed out of today. And thus, a blog post was born.

It turns out that a 1992 US Supreme Court Case, Quill Corp. v. North Dakota 504 U.S. 298 (1992) held that retailers are exempt from collecting sales taxes in states where they have no physical presence (nexus), such as a store, office, or warehouse. The case dealt with a catalog/mail order business, but it has since been applied to Internet retailers. The Court felt that requiring businesses to collect sales tax from 50 states with different rules would amount to an undue burden on interstate commerce.

OnGuard Online, a website by the Federal Trade Commission, urges people to exercise discretion when using social networking sites. While their advice is targeted towards parents of young children, it applies equally to people of all ages.

In general, the FTC cautions people to only post information to social networking sites that they are comfortable with others seeing. While the FTC recommends the use of privacy settings to restrict access to your social networking profile, we would add that once you send an e-mail or post a message or photo on your social networking page, this information can easily be viewed by or forwarded to persons outside of your intended network, regardless of your privacy settings.