People buying tickets online through Ticketmaster may be surprised to find themselves receiving spam as an encore.

The ticket service, which holds a lock on advance ticket sales for most major entertainment events, is taking heat from consumers for a privacy policy that does not let online ticket buyers opt out of receiving e-mail pitches from an event's producers and other businesses associated with it.

That, Ticketmaster critics say, means that the company has made receiving spam part of the price of admission.

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"We cannot offer you a separate opportunity to opt-out, or not to consent, to our sharing of your personal information with them," reads the policy. "Event Partners may use your personal information in accordance with their own privacy policies, and may consequently use your personal information to contact you and may share your personal information with others. You will need to contact those Event Partners who contact you to instruct them directly regarding your preferences for the use of your personal information by them."

Google was the first search engine to use a cookie that expires in 2038. Immortal cookies are now commonplace among search engines. These cookies place a unique ID number on the users computer. Anytime a user lands on a Google page, a Google cookie is given if it doesn't already exist. If it exists, Google reads and records the unique ID number. Sites like google or any other search engine, which users visit at least once a day have large amounts of data about all their users. Google, which is the starting page for most of our queries, can keep tabs on all our search words. Google news even keeps track of the links we click on. The current privacy policy of google states, “Please be aware, however, that we will release specific personal information about you if required to do so in order to comply with any valid legal process such as a search warrant, subpoena, statute, or court order”. The "Google as a Big Brother" article at google-watch.org gives a detailed overview of the dangers with google’s privacy policy. If a user decides not to use cookies, google does not give access to all its features, even when some of the features can be provided. [ ... ]

Police in Florida are creating a counterterrorism database designed to give law enforcement agencies around the country a powerful new tool to analyze billions of records about both criminals and ordinary Americans.

Organizers said the system, dubbed Matrix, enables investigators to find patterns and links among people and events faster than ever before, combining police records with commercially available collections of personal information about most American adults. It would let authorities, for instance, instantly find the name and address of every brown-haired owner of a red Ford pickup truck in a 20-mile radius of a suspicious event.

The state-level program, aided by federal funding, is poised to expand across the nation at a time when Congress has been sharply critical of similar data-driven systems on the federal level, such as a Pentagon plan for global surveillance and an air-passenger-screening system.

The Florida system is another example of the ongoing post-Sept. 11 debate about the proper balance between national security and individual privacy. Yesterday the District and the Department of Homeland Security announced plans to launch a pilot law enforcement data-sharing network that will include Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania and New York.

Paul S. Cameron, president of Seisint Inc., the Boca Raton, Fla., company that developed the Matrix system and donated it to the state, said: "It is exactly how law enforcement worked yesterday, except it's extraordinarily faster. In this age of risks that appear immediately, you have to be able to respond immediately."

Some civil liberties groups fear Matrix will dramatically lower the threshold for government snooping because other systems don't allow searches of criminal and commercial records with such ease or speed.

"It's going to make fishing expeditions so much more convenient," said Ari Schwartz, associate director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit that monitors privacy issues. "There's going to be a push to use it for many different kinds of purposes."

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A senior official overseeing the project acknowledged it could be intrusive and pledged to use it with restraint. "It's scary. It could be abused. I mean, I can call up everything about you, your pictures and pictures of your neighbors," said Phil Ramer, special agent in charge of statewide intelligence. "Our biggest problem now is everybody who hears about it wants it."

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In 1999, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the FBI suspended information service contracts with an earlier Asher-run company because of concerns about his past, according to law enforcement sources. The Chicago Tribune reported in 1987 that court documents in a federal drug case said defense lawyer F. Lee Bailey, who identified Asher as a pilot and onetime smuggler, offered him as an informant.

Jennie Khoen, a spokeswoman for the Florida department, said yesterday that the agency knew about Asher's "history with drug smuggling," including his work as an informant. Moore said his department "knew about Mr. Asher's past."

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The Secret Service, the FBI, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service gave Asher letters of commendation last year. They are prominently displayed as awards on Seisint's Web site. Spokesmen at the FBI and the Secret Service said the letters are routinely given as thank-you notes to hotels and other companies that help their agencies.

Annoying Cowwart writes "Looks like TIA is coming back, this time through the by-the States-but-all-together backdoor. Now called M.A.T.R.I.X. ('Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange'). See the Washington Post article for details. I wonder: do they have to try hard to find such apt names for their projects or does it come naturally? (For German speakers, there is another article about this in Der Spiegel.)"

The technology is ready, but planned electronic health record initiatives could fail unless privacy issues and legislation are sorted out, according to health privacy advocates speaking at a seminar in Sydney.

Until privacy issues are tackled, patients and health care providers will not take up and push for electronic health records (EHRs), said Amanda Cornwall, project manager at the NSW Health Care Complaints Commission.

"If you don't get the privacy stuff right, you won't even get past first base," Cornwall said. "Even the doctors will walk away from it."

Cornwall was speaking yesterday at an E-Security in Health conference in Sydney, hosted by security software provider Clearswift, where health groups and organisations debated the issues surrounding electronic health records.

While PKI technology enables secure information, there are still issues surrounding the human element and policies enforcing the use of such technology to iron out, according to Cornwall.

"It's not about the technological capabilities of PKI. It's about the human behaviour enforcing that," Cornwall said.

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Aug. 6 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW - News) today appointed Michelle Finneran Dennedy to the newly created position of Chief Privacy Officer. In her position, Dennedy will be responsible for continuing to develop and implement Sun's data privacy policies and practices, working across Sun's business groups to drive the company's continued data privacy excellence. In addition, she will work with Sun's product development teams and partners to deliver best-of-breed privacy enabling products and services.

IBM announced today new tools available at no charge for download from IBM's alphaWorks Web site to help independent software vendors (ISVs) and enterprises link new and existing applications with enterprise privacy management software, such as IBM Tivoli Privacy Manager.

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Using the two new tools -- the Reference Monitor for Tivoli Privacy Manager and Declarative Privacy Monitoring for Tivoli Privacy Manager -- developers can reduce the time and expertise needed to create new monitors for their applications.

These monitors link new and existing applications to privacy management software, allowing developers to build privacy rules and audit reporting into the applications without having to hard-code privacy functions into each individual application. By making applications "privacy aware" automatically, updating privacy policies can become easier and more manageable.

So Rep. Howard Berman jokes that he "probably" does not favor the death penalty for infringers, Sen. Orrin Hatch half-jokes that he would like to blow up the computers of infringers and Rep. John Carter wants to see infringing college kids thrown in jail for 33 months.

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n the past decade, through dozens of congressional oversight hearings where usually only industry representatives testify, Congress has been completely convinced that rampant copyright infringement threatens to destroy the American economy. Having internalized this threat, Congress is now determined to fix that problem the only way it knows how--threaten ordinary citizens with jail, despite collateral consequences.

And yet, just about everyone outside the Beltway knows that criminal copyright law has already gone too far. We necessarily commit copyright infringement as an unavoidable consequence of living in a digital society. But the criminal law already treats much of that conduct the same as it treats the blatant piracy that poses more serious jeopardy to copyright owner interests. With the rules so bluntly delineated, we cannot respect them or comply.

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If the record industry thinks that its problems warrant litigation, they should use the laws that are already on the books. Of course, those lawsuits come at some risk, as they require the industry to sue its customers. But the record industry, much more so than government prosecutors, can determine the cost benefit of suing customers to reduce infringement. If the record industry decides that lawsuits are not worth it, what does that say about the need for criminal enforcement?