Cyber Info Never Dies

It’s official: anything you ever email at work will be stored for evermore and, should the circumstance ever arise, will be used against you! AP business writer Christopher Rugaber, observes that “U.S. companies will need to know more about where they store e-mails, instant messages and other electronic documents generated by their employees in the event they are sued, thanks to changes in federal rules that took effect Friday,” according to legal experts.

“The changes, approved by the Supreme Court's administrative arm in April after a five-year review, require companies and other parties involved in federal litigation to produce ‘electronically stored information’ as part of discovery, the process by which both sides share evidence before a trial.”

There you have it: if you write it and send it, your message will live on and on and on…

Privacy Related Sites

Here are some privacy related websites:

www.privacyrights.org

www.healthprivacy.org

www.junkbusters.com

Surveillance: Good or Bad?

Here are five issues about surveillance posed by Eugene Volokh, Professor of Law at UCLA, and author of “The First Amendment” who observes that “surveillance is not inherently good or bad.”

In any given surveillance situation, he says, one has first has to determine:
* What concrete security benefits will the proposal likely provide?
* Exactly how might it be abused?
* Might it decrease the risk of policed abuse rather than increase it?
* What control mechanisms can be set up to help diminish the risk of abuse?
* What other surveillance is this proposal likely to lead to?

“Such analysis suggests that traffic cameras are a good idea at least as an experiment. Cameras at public places from ATM machines to convenience stores are probably worth trying.”

Each situation needs to be evaluated independently to determine whether Breathing Space is curtailed or enhanced.

Getting Your Name off of Lists!

Here’s a website titled “How Consumers Can Opt Out of Directory Assistance and Non-public Information, which explains that “there are many websites that sell or provide for free, personal information about individuals. This information is gathered from many sources including white pages listings (directory assistance), publicly-available sources and public records.”