Two abortion clinics are fighting Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline's demand for the clinics to turn over the complete medical records of nearly 90 women and girls. He says he needs the material for an investigation into underage sex and illegal late-term abortions. The medical records include the patient's name, medical history, details of her sex life, birth control practices and psychological profile.
A Palm Beach County, Fla., health department employee accidentally attached to an e-mail a confidential file containing the names and addresses of 4,500 county AIDS patients and 2,000 others who had tested positive for HIV. The e-mail was sent to 800 county employees.
A Florida appeals court has ruled that a wife "illegally obtained" records and violated the state's wiretapping law when she secretly installed spyware on her husband's computer. The court banned the wife from revealing the contents of her husband's online conversations with another woman.
Brittan Elementary School in Sutter, CA, has abandoned an experimental RFID program after InCom, the company which developed the technology, pulled out of its agreement with the school. Last week, EPIC, along with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and ACLU-Northern California, urged the Brittan School Board in a joint letter to terminate the program that used mandatory ID badges to track children's movements in and around the school with RFID technology.
ChoicePoint, one of the largest commercial data brokers in the U.S., is warning more than 100,000 people nationwide that they may be the victims of identity theft. ChoicePoint revealed this week that it had inadvertently sold personal and financial records, including addresses and Social Security numbers, to fraud artists.
A national prescription hotline in Australia, set up by the federal Health Department, has been exempted from the country's privacy laws. This exemption means that doctors who suspect their patients are drug addicts can access health records, including prescription histories, without the patients' consent.
Iowa wants to collect personal information on thousands of residents who receive mental health services paid for by the government. The Department of Human Services officials say the data, including patients' names and services received, is needed to account for how the state spends the millions of dollars earmarked for mental health.
The government of Canadian province British Columbia recently signed a contract outsourcing maintenance of its health care system to a company based in the U.S. British Columbians protesting this contract fear the private health records collected by Maximus could be seized by U.S. law enforcement under the PATRIOT Act.
The names, e-mails, contact numbers and other private details about customers of computer maker Acer were revealed on its Australian Web site. The security breach was created three months ago by a software glitch that went unnoticed by Acer.
The UK retail giant Tesco faces a boycott over its use of Radio Frequency Identification technology. The company has been experimenting with RFID since 1992 and has said that it aims to have readers in its supply chain, stores and at all its registers. Recently, Tesco announced plans to tag individual store items. Such RFID tags would give retailers the potential to track goods after they have been bought and left the store.
In a 6-2 decision in Illinois vs. Caballes, the U.S. Supreme Court expanded the authority of police officers to use drug- or bomb-sniffing dogs to search people in airports, schools, office buildings or highways. The court ruled that such a search does not violate the privacy rights of a stopped motorist even if there was no reason to suspect the motorist.
Federal employees are concerned about a new ID badge set to debut in October. The badges, intended as a security measure, would contain extensive amounts of the employee's personal data and allow managers to track an employee's movement throughout a building.
A federal judge in Utica, NY, ruled that police officers do not need a warrant to secretly attach a Global Positioning System device to a suspect's vehicle, and use that to track the suspect's movements. The judge said that a suspect traveling on a highway has no reasonable expectation of privacy, so his civil liberties are not violated by this secret tracking.
A simple trip to an ATM provided a wealth of financial information for one journalist in Jeddah. He learned that anyone, even non-account holders, can learn the name of the owner of any account at the bank by simply entering the account number into the ATM. And that was only the first piece of information that he learned.
Many people were surprised to learn in a recent Canadian lawsuit that so-called PIN messages sent on BlackBerry devices can be logged and archived. These messages are thought to be more private than regular BlackBerry e-mails because PIN messages are sent directly from one device to another without going through the BlackBerry Enterprise Server. But direct does not mean untraceable, and more companies are beginning to log and archive all BlackBerry messages.
What happens if a company relying on a privacy statement by a Internet Service Provider discovers that they are violating their customers' privacy? It may be that their customers will take out their anger about privacy violations on the company and not its Internet Service Provider. That is the question that companies interested in outsourcing their web offerings to customers should be asking themselves according to an article on data management.
A court case in Maine filed by Ronald Fitch who is suing the anonymous sender of insulting e-mail is claiming identity theft is challenging the privacy right of e-mail senders. The message sent to other community residents was made to appear as if it had come from Ronald Fitch. The sender of the e-mail is fighting to not have their name disclosed by the court case. The standard for determining the need to reveal the identity of an anonymous e-communication should be higher than that the e-mail was critical.
