Classmates.com’s Facebook Mimicking Prompts Privacy Suit: Via Threat Level.

The long-lost pal locating site, Classmates.com, has been hit with a class action privacy lawsuit alleging the company violated the law when it decided to make user profiles public in order to compete with Facebook.

The suit alleges that Classmates.com duped its paying customers in late January when it sent them an e-mail saying that members would have to opt-out of new Facebook and iPhone apps to keep their data private. That’s a massive change to the site’s privacy policy and violates federal and Washington State privacy and fairness laws, according to the suit (.pdf) filed in a Washington State federal district court March 5.

Classmates.com has long kept user information non-public, and only paying members can read e-mails sent to them by others, see ‘old friends’ on a map, and see who has been looking at their profile. While the site has some 3 million paying users, it’s been eclipsed by sites like Facebook and MySpace, which have more members, more public profiles and don’t charge.

In order to keep up, Classmates.com decided to make “public Classmates content available to people using a variety of sites and devices, including Facebook and the iPhone,” according to a January 30 e-mail sent to users. [ Read more ... ]

Major ISPs Help Fund BitTorrent User Tracking Research: Via Slashdot YRO.

An anonymous reader writes "I was scanning conference proceedings to come up with ideas for a reading group I run at my workplace, and I noticed an interesting paper from the new IEEE WIFS forensics conference. Researchers from the University of Colorado have published a technique for tracking BitTorrent users (PDF) by joining and actively probing torrent swarms using low-cost cloud computing services. They claim their methods allowed them to monitor the entire Pirate Bay torrent set for as little as $13/mo using EC2. But that's not even the interesting part. Their work appears to have been 'funded in part through gifts from PolyCipher' — a broadband ISP consortium. That's right; three major national ISPs funded this round of BitTorrent tracking research, not the MPAA/RIAA. Could this be evidence of ISP support for ACTA and a global three-strikes law?"

Read Original Article:(Via Slashdot.)

EFF Panel in Pittsburgh: Architecture Is Policy: Via EFF.org Updates.

Pittsburgh - On Monday, March 8, at 4 p.m., board members of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) will discuss the societal impact of technology design in a panel at Carnegie Mellon University.

Technology design can maximize or decimate our basic rights to free speech, privacy, property ownership, and creative thought. The panel will discuss some good and bad design decisions through the years and the ramifications of those decisions.

Monday's panel is free and open to the public.

WHAT:
Architecture Is Policy: The Legal and Social Impact of Technical Design Decisions

WHEN:
4 p.m.
Monday, March 8 [ Read more ... ]

The Spy at Harriton High: Via Stryde Hax blog.

This investigation into the remote spying allegedly being conducted against students at Lower Merion represents an attempt to find proof of spying and a look into the toolchain used to accomplish spying. Taking a look at the LMSD Staff List, Mike Perbix is listed as a Network Tech at LMSD. Mr. Perbix has a large online web forum footprint as well as a personal blog, and a lot of his posts, attributed to his role at Lower Merion, provide insight into the tools, methods, and capabilities deployed against students at LMSD. Of the three network techs employed at LMSD, Mr. Perbix appears to have been the mastermind behind a massive, highly effective digital panopticon.
PanoMasterMind

The primary piece of evidence, already being reported on by a Fox affiliate, is this amazing promotional webcast for a remote monitoring product named LANRev. [ Read more ... ]

F.B.I. Queries Webcam Use by Schools: Via NYT > Privacy.

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — A Pennsylvania school district accused of secretly switching on laptop computer cameras inside students’ homes is under investigation by federal authorities, a law enforcement official with knowledge of the case said.

The F.B.I. will look into whether any federal wiretap or computer-intrusion laws were violated by Lower Merion School District, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. [ Read more ... ]

Pa. school district denies spying on students with MacBooks: Via Computerworld.

Claims it only remotely activated cameras to locate lost or stolen Apple laptops

A suburban Philadelphia school district yesterday denied it spied on students by remotely activating the cameras on their school-issued MacBook laptops.

In a statement released late Thursday, Christopher McGinley, the superintendent of Lower Merion School District of Ardmore, Pa., admitted that the MacBooks' cameras could be turned on without the user's knowledge, but said that the functionality was part of a security feature.

[...]

Laptop cameras have only been activated for that purpose, McGinley continued. "The District has not used the tracking feature or web cam for any other purpose or in any other manner whatsoever," he said. [ Read more ... ]

Minds for Sale | Berkman Center: Via The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School.

Minds for Sale

Jonathan Zittrain, Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society

Monday, February 22, 5:30PM
Austin East Classroom, Austin Hall, Harvard Law School (Map)
Register Here for Harvard Alumni (Alumni / Friends $5)
For Community Members, email haa_alumnieducation@harvard.edu or call 617-495-1920.
This event will be webcast live and archived on our site shortly after. [ Read more ... ]

Pa. schools spy on students using laptop webcams, claims lawsuit: Via Computerworld.

Class-action suit alleges schools remotely activate webcams on school-issued notebooks

Computerworld - A suburban Philadelphia school district remotely activates the cameras in school-provided laptops to spy on students in their homes, a lawsuit filed in federal court Tuesday alleged.

According to the lawsuit filed by a high school student and his parents, the Lower Merion School District of Ardmore, Pa. has spied on students and families by "indiscriminate use of and ability to remotely activate the webcams incorporated into each laptop issued to students by the School District."

Approximately 1,800 students at the district's two high schools have been given laptops as part of a state- and federally-funded "one-to-one" student-to-laptop initiative.

Michael and Holly Robbins of Penn Valley, Pa., said they first found out about the alleged spying last November after their son Blake was accused by a Harriton High School official of "improper behavior in his home" and shown a photograph taken by his laptop.

An assistant principal at Harriton later confirmed that the district could remotely activate the webcam in students' laptops. [ Read more ... ]

Why Pete Warden Should Not Release Profile Data on 215 Million Facebook Users: Via Michael Zimmer.org .

Speaking of the research ethics related to automatically harvesting public social networking data, we are confronted this week with the story of Pete Warden, a former Apple engineer who has spent the last six months harvesting and analyzing data from some 215 million public Facebook profile pages.

According to Warden, he exploited a flaw in Facebook’s architecture to access public profiles without needing to be signed in to a Facebook account, effectively avoiding being bound by Facebook’s Terms of Service preventing such automated harvesting of data. As a result, he amassed a database of names, fan pages, and lists of friends for 215 million public Facebook accounts. [ Read more ... ]

Rulings Leave Online Student Speech Rights Unresolved: Via Threat Level.

Do American students have First Amendment rights beyond the schoolyard gates?

The answer is yes and no, according to two conflicting federal appellate decisions Thursday testing student speech in the online world.

“Ultimately, the Supreme Court is going to have to decide if there ever is a time students have full-fledged First Amendment rights,” said Frank LoMonte, executive director of Virginia-Based Student Press Law Center. He’s one of the attorneys in the cases the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decided.

The U.S. Supreme Court has never squarely addressed the parameters of off-campus, online student speech, but might soon. So far, lower courts appear to be guided by a 1969 high court ruling saying student expression may not be suppressed unless school officials reasonably conclude that it will “materially and substantially disrupt the work and discipline of the school.”

In that landmark case, the Supreme Court said students had a First Amendment right to wear black armbands to protest the Vietnam War. But that precedent, which addressed on-campus speech, is now being applied to students’ online speech four decades later.

One of the cases favoring student speech decided Thursday concerns a senior and honors student. In 2005, the Pennsylvania high school student was suspended 10 days after he created a mock MySpace profile of his principal. [ Read more ... ]

Google Puts New Focus on Outside Research: Via Bits Blog - NYTimes.com .

Google, like other leading technology companies, funds university research in fields where its interest and the interest of science coincide. Until now, the company has done that mainly with lots of smaller grants, typically $50,000 or so.

But Google is stepping up its funding. In a focused approach to be announced on Tuesday, the company is making a $5.7 million commitment to a dozen university research projects. The money is earmarked for four areas: machine learning, the use of cellphones as data collection devices in science, energy efficiency in computing and privacy.

“We’ve identified four extremely important areas, both to Google and to society,” said Alfred Spector, the company’s vice president of research and special initiatives. [ Read more ... ]

FBI investigating online New York school district theft: Via Computerworld Cybercrime/Hacking News.

A New York school district has reverted to using paper checks after cybercriminals tried to steal about $3.8 million from its online accounts just before Christmas, prompting an FBI investigation.

For three days starting Dec. 18, cybercriminals started transferring money overseas from the accounts of the Duanesburg Central School District, which has two schools with about 950 students about 20 miles west of Albany, New York. [ Read more ... ]

SSRN-Buying You: The Government's Use of Fourth-Parties to Launder Data about 'The People' by Joshua Simmons: Via SSRN then Columbia Law School's Columbia Business Law Review, Vol. 2009, No. 3, p. 950. Paper by Joshua L. Simmons

Abstract:     
Your information is for sale, and the government is buying it at alarming rates. The CIA, FBI, Justice Department, Defense Department, and other government agencies are at this very moment turning to a group of companies to provide them information that these companies can gather without the restrictions that bind government intelligence agencies. The information is gathered from sources that few would believe the government could gain unfettered access to, but which, under current Fourth Amendment doctrine and statutory protections, are completely accessible. [ Read more ... ]

Hacked E-Mails Fuel Global Warming Debate: Via Threat Level.

An online debate over global warming science has broken out after an unknown hacker broke into the e-mail server at a prominent, British climate-research center, stole more than a thousand e-mails about global warming research and posted them online.

Global warming skeptics are seizing on portions of the messages as evidence that scientists are colluding and warping data to fit the theory of global warming, but researchers say the e-mails are being taken out of context and just show scientists engaged in frank discussion.

The Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia is one of the United Kingdom’s leading climate research centers and has been a strong proponent of the position that global warming is real and has human causes. The center confirmed the hack occurred in an e-mail statement to Threat Level. [ Read more ... ]

Syracuse University Orange to Crush Student Privacy Rights: Via CDT - PolicyBeta.

Recently Syracuse University, my alma mater, took steps to increase campus security by installing a video-surveillance system in all entrances and exits of residence halls and one academic building. This took two years of planning for the 168 new cameras being installed on campus, but it is unclear how the University is ensuring the privacy of students as they begin to monitor the campus over video.

When implementing a video surveillance system of this scale, people often forget that it’s not just the “bad guys” and criminals that end up on the tape, it’s every person walking through the building. Every day, these tapes will archive the movements of thousands of students, faculty and staff members at the university, most of which will never be involved in a crime.

Students may worry that “big brother” is watching them even as they go about the mundane details of their day, moving in and out of their buildings, but they should also be aware of data retention issues associated with this system and demand answers and that appropriate privacy policies be put in place. [ Read more ... ]

PrivAds: Behavioral Advertising without Tracking: Via Freedom to Tinker.

There's an interesting new paper out of Stanford and NYU, about a system called "PrivAds" that tries to provide behavioral advertising on web sites, without having a central server gather detailed information about user behavior. If the paper's approach turns out to work, it could have an important impact on the debate about online advertising and privacy.

Advertisers have obvious reasons to show you ads that match your interests. You can benefit too, if you see ads that are relevant to your needs, rather than ones you don't care about. The problem, as I argued in my Congressional testimony, comes when sites track your activities, and build up detailed files on you, in order to do the targeting.

PrivAds tries to solve this problem by providing behavioral advertising without having any server track you. [ Read more ... ]

Project ‘Gaydar’: An MIT experiment raises new questions about online privacy: Via The Boston Globe.

At MIT, an experiment identifies which students are gay, raising new questions about online privacy

It started as a simple term project for an MIT class on ethics and law on the electronic frontier.

Two students partnered up to take on the latest Internet fad: the online social networks that were exploding into the mainstream. With people signing up in droves to reconnect with classmates and old crushes from high school, and even becoming online “friends” with their family members, the two wondered what the online masses were unknowingly telling the world about themselves. The pair weren’t interested in the embarrassing photos or overripe profiles that attract so much consternation from parents and potential employers. Instead, they wondered whether the basic currency of interactions on a social network - the simple act of “friending” someone online - might reveal something a person might rather keep hidden. [ Read more ... ]

Andrew Patrick » Identity theft is usually an equal opportunity, unsophisticated crime: Via Andrew Patrick.

Identity theft, the misuse of someone’s personal identity to commit fraud, is a large and growing economic and legal problem. Identity theft has become the most prevalent form of fraud resulting in billions of dollars in losses.

ID theft is often considered a “white-collar” crime because it is committed during the course of normal employment duties (e.g., a bank employee gathering personal information), or the crime does not usually involve any physical harm. Identity thieves are often portrayed as sophisticated computer specialists, hackers, or organized networks. But, is this the reality?

A recent research report by Heith Copes (U Alabama at Birmingham) and Lynne Vieraitis (U Texas at Austin) has shed some light on this issue. [ Read more ... ]

SSRN-Americans Reject Tailored Advertising and Three Activities that Enable It by Joseph Turow, Jennifer King, Chris Hoofnagle, Amy Bleakley, Michael Hennessy: Via SSRN-Social Science Electronic Publishing.

This nationally representative telephone (wire-line and cell phone) survey explores Americans' opinions about behavioral targeting by marketers, a controversial issue currently before government policymakers. Behavioral targeting involves two types of activities: following users' actions and then tailoring advertisements for the users based on those actions. While privacy advocates have lambasted behavioral targeting for tracking and labeling people in ways they do not know or understand, marketers have defended the practice by insisting it gives Americans what they want: advertisements and other forms of content that are as relevant to their lives as possible. [ Read more ... ]

Advertising - Two-Thirds of Americans Object to Online Tracking, Study Says: Via NYTimes.com .

ABOUT two-thirds of Americans object to online tracking by advertisers — and that number rises once they learn the different ways marketers are following their online movements, according to a new survey from professors at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California, Berkeley.

The professors say they believe the study, scheduled for release on Wednesday, is the first independent, nationally representative telephone survey on behavioral advertising. [ Read more ... ]

NSW seeks to build 'unhackable' netbook network: Via Security - Technology - News - iTnews.com.au.

The NSW Department of Education is using asset-tracking software, RFID tags, and BIOS-embedded filtering smarts to roll out 240,000 netbook computers into what CIO Stephen Wilson calls "the most hostile environment you can roll computers into" - the local high school.

The rollout of Lenovo netbooks, funded under the Federal Government's Digital Education Revolution initiative, is a massive logistical and IT security challenge, and the solution Wilson and his team has put together to address these issues could well be applicable to any corporate IT department. [ Read more ... ]

Online Privacy: Industry Self-Regulation in Practice (Google Tech Talks): Via YouTube :: Videos by googletechtalks.

Online Privacy: Industry Self-Regulation in Practice


Google Tech Talk
September 17, 2009

ABSTRACT

Aleecia M. McDonald will speak about industry self-regulation for online privacy. After a brief overview of how we got here, we will explore the status quo through two studies. First, what is the user burden if people read online privacy policies? How long would it take to do so, and what is the economic value of that time? Second, how well can users understand privacy policies? We evaluated six privacy policies in three different presentation formats and found standardized formats do not help users as much as their proponents might like. Finally, we conclude with an overview of public policy options for online privacy. Bring your ideas, we could have a lively discussion. [ Read more ... ]

Whoops! Students 'Going Google' Get to Read Each Other's Emails: Via NYTimes.com .

A recent bug in Google Apps allowed students at several colleges to read each other's email messages and some were even able to see another student's entire inbox. The issue occurred at a small handful of colleges, admitted Rajen Sheth, senior product manager for Google Apps, but he declined to say how many other institutions were affected. However, according to Donald Tom, director of IT for support services at Brown University, one of the institutions undergoing the transition, he got the impression that a total of 10 schools faced the problem.

While the glitch itself was minor and was fixed in a few days, the real concern - at least at Brown - was with how Google handled the situation. Without communicating to the internal IT department, Google shut down the affected accounts, a decision which led to a heated conversation between school officials and the Google account representative. [ Read more ... ]

"I Agreed to WHAT?!" Re-envisioning License Agreements and Privacy Statements: Via Google Tech Talk.

Presented by Michael Terry (mterry@cs.uwaterloo.ca)

License agreements and privacy statements are common features of software and software services, but less than 2% of the population actually read them. While many companies have little motivation to compel users to read such agreements, there are nonetheless times when it is advantageous to effectively communicate legal terms to one's user base. [ Read more ... ]