老澳门开奖结果

Reports this week that Facebook鈥檚 new Timeline was placing private messages into people鈥檚 public Timeline displays. Facebook said it was certain that was not happening. According to a statement from Facebook:

Our engineers investigated these reports and found that the messages were older wall posts that had always been visible on the users' profile pages. Facebook is satisfied that there has been no breach of user privacy.

Regardless of whether the technical problem was, in fact, occurring, I think that a privacy breach has occurred, at least for some people. Many early adopters of Facebook report that in the early days their Facebook page was an intimate space鈥攕hared with perhaps just a small number of college friends鈥攚here they exchanged messages that were far more personal than is typical today. Facebook felt like a closed room to many people. Whether or not the 鈥減rivacy bug鈥� here is real, people鈥檚 underlying feelings are correct: to take conversations conducted among one set of people, and expose them to a second, broader set of people, does constitute a 鈥渂reach of user privacy.鈥� It should be noted that Facebook does allow users to items from their timeline after the fact.

There鈥檚 been a new development in the ongoing battle to determine who gets helped and who gets hurt by the fact that more and more people are carrying video cameras with them at all times (in their smartphones). Homeland Security officials in Delaware have a smartphone app that can be used to send video of 鈥渟uspicious activity鈥� to the state鈥檚 fusion center. I鈥檓 skeptical how many people are going to download such an app, though it鈥檚 possible that with enough official encouragement it could become much more common to shoot video to the authorities. We have been critical of overbroad citizen 鈥渨atch鈥� programs since this 2004 report and before, but if this kind of thing really did become common it would raise the practice鈥攊ncluding the implicit racial profiling that it involves鈥攖o a whole new level. (via )

The National Institute of Justice, which is the R&D arm of the U.S. Justice Department, is planning to evaluate the effectiveness of sensors that can see through walls, according to a published in today鈥檚 Federal Register. As we mentioned in our December , technologies such as Synthetic Aperture Radar are being developed that do have the potential to see through walls. Such technologies hold promise for such applications as disaster recovery, but obviously could be an absolute nightmare for privacy, whether deployed on a drone or from the street. Fortunately, after the , it鈥檚 clear that government use of such a device would require a warrant to see into a home. Still, this is a technology that bears watching and it will be interesting to see how effective these devices are judged to be.

Jim Harper at Cato points out this dynamic, much-viewed on why defense attorneys always tell their clients not speak to the police. In the talk, one of the points that law professor James Duane makes is the same point that I made with respect to privacy in my post on why people should care about privacy even if they think they have 鈥渘othing to hide鈥�: the law is so extensive and complicated that the authorities do not have much trouble finding something to charge a person with, once that suspect comes into their cross hairs. Partly quoting this Heritage Foundation by Paul Rosenzweig, Duane says,

One expert on criminal law recently noted, estimates of the current size of the body of federal criminal law vary, although it has been reported that the Congressional Research Service can no longer even count the current number of federal crimes. That鈥檚 right, even the federal government has lost count. These laws are scattered over all 50 titles of the U.S. Code, encompassing roughly 27,000 pages. Worse yet, these statutes often incorporate by reference the provisions of administrative regulations. Estimates of how many such regulations exist are even less well settled, although the ABA thinks there may be nearly 10,000.

So the next time someone tells you they don鈥檛 care about surveillance because they haven鈥檛 done anything wrong, you should say: are you sure?