Technology & Civil Liberties News Roundup - July 28, 2010

by Tamar Gubins (Jul 28, 2010 10:00 am)

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Senators fail to agree on privacy approach - Senate Commerce Committee hearing on online privacy [cnet]

“An unusually lengthy Senate Commerce Committee hearing on Tuesday, titled ‘Consumer Online Privacy,’ made it clear that there was zero consensus on what approach to take.”

See also: Momentum building for federal online privacy rules

ACLU Senate Testimony

 

Privacy Lawsuit Targets Net Giants Over ‘Zombie’ Cookies [wired]

“A wide swath of the net’s top websites, including MTV, ESPN, MySpace, Hulu, ABC, NBC and Scribd, were sued in federal court Friday on the grounds they violated federal computer intrusion law by secretly using storage in Adobe’s Flash player to re-create cookies deleted by users.”

 

100 million Facebook pages leaked on torrent site [THINQ]

“The 2.8GB torrent was compiled by a web crawler program that harvested data on users contained in Facebook's open access directory, which lists all users who haven't bothered to change their privacy settings to make their pages unavailable to search engines.”

 

An Amazon-Facebook Alliance to Make Shopping More Social [NY Times]

“Now, Amazon shoppers who connect their Amazon and Facebook accounts transport their Facebook friends to Amazon — and can get recommendations from those friends on what to buy.”

 

Second Student Sues School District Over Webcam Spying [wired]

“The latest allegations (.pdf) Tuesday, brought by an 18-year-old former student who had just graduated from Lower Merion High, came to light in the discovery phase of Robbins’ suit.”

 

LIGATT Security Tries to Silence its Online Critics With an Unsubstantiated Lawsuit [EFF]

“Earlier this month, LIGATT upped the ante by filing suit in a Georgia court, threatening about 25 anonymous commenters on Yahoo! Message Boards and demanding a $5 million judgment and a court order prohibiting criticism.”

 

Google nabs patent to monitor your cursor movements [TechEye]

“Google has been awarded a patent for displaying search results based on how you move your mouse cursor on the screen.”

 

Tech firms warn privacy bill will harm economy [cnet]

“[The Rush] privacy bill introduced in the U.S. Congress this week would have serious unintended consequences and could even harm the nation's economy.”

 

Solving the Privacy Dilemma [Huffington Post]

“A surprising solution might be found if businesses used more, instead of less data.”

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