Privacy Issues Dominate Week’s Technology News
Jul 7th, 2008 • Posted in: NewsAmong the stories: Google sued by company seeking identities of YouTube viewers; data breaches on the rise, often due to loss of laptops and insider theft; audit says State Department does a poor job of securing private passport information
VARIOUS DATELINES
The uneasy balance between advancing technology and diminishing privacy was the subject of several major stories last week. Among them:
- Two of the most salient ethical issues related to high tech — privacy and intellectual property — were debated last week after a U.S. federal judge ordered Google, owner of YouTube, to turn over records of videos viewed by users. Reuters reports that while the action comes as part of a showdown over video piracy, with Viacom requesting the information as part of a $1 billion copyright infringement suit, privacy advocates are crying foul, claiming that the data could be used to finger individual users. Representatives of the privacy watchdog Electronic Frontier Foundation say the decision threatens to expose “deeply private information.” Attorneys for both YouTube and Viacom say they are attempting to work out a way to keep the identities of individual users private, reports Reuters.
- Privacy advocates in the United Kingdom are protesting the arrival of Google’s Street View, an adjunct to the search firm’s popular mapping service that shows a driver’s view, from ground level, of streets, buildings, and people. The BBC reports that privacy groups are claiming that U.K. laws, which are more stringent than those in the United States, would prohibit the photography of people on the street without their explicit permission. Google, which began limited street mapping in France several weeks ago, responded to protests there by blurring the faces of passersby and car registration numbers, reports MacWorld UK. The service, which collects the images with specially equipped camera mounts on cars, caused similar concern in the United States when some people protested that the company invaded their privacy by putting their movements on display for a worldwide audience.
- Businesses, governments, and universities reported a 69 percent increase in data breaches during the first half of 2008 compared to the same time period a year ago, according to a survey by a nonprofit group, the Washington Post reports. The survey, conducted by the Identity Theft Resource Center, found that about a third of the breaches stemmed from businesses. Rates of breaches among health care providers and banks increased, according to the survey, but decreased among educational institutions, government agencies, and the military. The leading identifiable cause of data breaches: lost or stolen laptops and other digital storage media. According to a summary of the report from Forbes, the second-leading factor in loss of sensitive data is insider theft. Researcher Linda Foley tells Forbes that insider theft is “the path of least resistance. As in retail, it’s much easier for a cashier to steal money out of the till than for a robber to come in with a mask and a gun.”
- Government workers repeatedly snooped on the private details of high-profile passport records, according to a report from the U.S. State Department Inspector General. According to UPI, the Inspector General claims there is a lack of control over the data of the 127 million Americans with passports. The audit was undertaken after news reports revealed that three contract workers had accessed private passport files for three of the U.S. presidential candidates. In addition to politicians, UPI reports, workers seemed fascinated by entertainers, with one unidentified celebrity’s file accessed 352 times by 72 people.
- Two civil rights groups have filed a federal lawsuit asking the U.S. Justice Department to turn over records related to claims that the government uses people’s cell phones in order to track their movements, reports technology trade journal InformationWeek. The suit, jointly filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, claims that the government used cell-phone information to track users’ locations without any court oversight.
Sources: MacWorld, July 5 — BBC, July 5 — UPI, July 5 — Reuters, July 4 — InformationWeek, July 2 — Washington Post, July 1 — Forbes, June 30.
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