Privacy Working Group

The Washington Post reports that Facebook is preparing to tackle the legislative process and policies in Washington. Former senior legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, Timothy Sparapani, has been hired as Facebook’s lead lobbyist to help define Internet-privacy legislation currently taking shape.

This comes at a time when Congress has sparked interest in creating new privacy legislation. Yesterday, lawmakers met and heard testimony on online advertising and the privacy concerns with tracking users. Congress has finally recognized the need for personal data protection on the Internet. Many providers and companies who gain from online advertising believe self regulation is the answer to privacy concerns as opposed to more laws that will quickly be out of date as technology grows.

Just when is government regulation necessary? Powerful lobbyists are sure to play a key role in shaping future legislation, and it remains to be seen which direction Facebook and other social networking sites move.

A Fordham University law school professor does not believe there is enough privacy protection online. To prove the point he assigned his students a novel research project. This year’s students were challenged to create a dossier on the notoriously private Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia from publicly available information. Scalia was not amused.

ABC News reported that Professor Joel Reidenberg asked his students to compile any personal information they could find online about Justice Scalia. The students are said to have found such information as a home telephone number, his wife’s email address and pictures of his grandchildren. Justice Scalia was not pleased saying Reidenberg showed “abominably poor judgment”.

Reidenberg sought to prove the point that although there is often small bits of information about individuals on the Internet when all of those pieces are compiled it becomes a very thorough profile. Reidenberg adds that while personal information might have always been accessible it was through court records and town halls where the “effort and expense” of finding the information gave it protection.

The professor decided to pick Justice Scalia as the center of the project because of a speech the Justice gave earlier this year where he said that he was not bothered by the availability of personal information saying that he doesn’t “find that particularly offensive”.

Tell us what you think….did Reidenberg go too far?

There is nothing more private than a medical condition. People go to great lengths to keep their ailments private. Now, consider this, when the government takes over healthcare there is going to be a desire to keep tabs on people and store that information in a database. Any potential database could cost taxpayers millions, maybe even billions of dollars. Then there is the problem of security. How secure will a government database (or any database for that matter) be?

A May 4 Washington Post article may provide some insight in to potential problems with a database:

Hackers last week broke into a Virginia state Web site used by pharmacists to track prescription drug abuse. They deleted records on more than 8 million patients and replaced the site’s homepage with a ransom note demanding $10 million for the return of the records, according to a posting on Wikileaks.org, an online clearinghouse for leaked documents.

Wow, if this doesn’t make the hair on the back of your neck stand up nothing will. A national database of people and their ailments could be the scariest scenario possible.

While you may think that this is paranoia, consider what happened last year when State Department officials were snooping around the passport files of then Presidential candidates, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain. According to CBS News:

State Department workers pried into the supposedly secure passport files of presidential contenders Hillary Rodham Clinton, Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain, abashed officials admitted Friday in a revelation that had Condoleezza Rice telephoning the candidates to personally apologize.

The federal government needs to tread lightly as they consider gathering any information about American citizens.