The Washington Post has a feature on the story of Megan Meier, the girl who committed suicide based on messages she received from a group of cyberbullies. The feature tells the entire story of the saga from start to end, and nicely illustrates the mentality and organization of online groups with questionable intentions. Also of interest is the limited statutory options prosecutors had in Read More
FTC Proposes Online Behavioral Ad Principles
To address important consumer privacy concerns associated with online behavioral advertising, the Federal Trade Commission recently released a set of proposed principles for advertisers to follow. The “principles” include (a) that web sites that collect behavioral data should prominently display this fact and give consumers the option to “opt-out” of the collection, (b) any data that is collected Read More
Data Thefts and Breaches Rising
Organizations that maintain personal data are spending more money and time on improving security, but many are finding that investments are too late or insufficient. Various watchdog groups report that the number of compromised records in 2007 reached 162 million records worldwide. The groups reported that 2007 was a record year for the number of privacy security breaches. While the Read More
Expanded Records Retention in P2P Litigation
The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) won a copyright lawsuit against the operators of TorrentSpy.com primarily because of the defendants’ tampering of evidence. The court determined that the defendants had destroyed evidence after another judge had ordered them to keep server logs, user IP (Internet Protocol) addresses and other information. TorrentSpy argued that it destroyed certain records Read More
House Passes Permanent Do Not Call Ban
Updating a previous post in CyberLawg, the U.S. House of Representatives has easily passed a bill that would make phone numbers on the FTC’s Do Not Call list permanent. The list is available at donotcall.gov. The ease with which this passed was somewhat surprising, but new facts appear to have contributed to its passage. First, the FTC has hired a contractor to review the registry regularly and Read More
Suit Challenges Verizon on Blackberry GPS
Verizon Wireless has been named in a class action lawsuit alleging that the wireless giant wrongfully and unfairly deceived purchasers of BlackBerry model 8830 smartphones. The suit alleges that Verizon intentionally disabled the devices' free, built-in global positioning systems (GPS) then offered a proprietary Verizon fee-for-service GPS. You can see a copy of the complaint here. While there Read More
Open Source Fears Fuel Microsoft Pirating Policy
Microsoft is reassessing security systems that disable pirated programs on users' computers in favor of the approach employed by “trialware” and “shareware:” constant nagging. While the current version of Microsoft’s Genuine Advantage tool will disable pirated software, the newer version being released with Vista’s first Service Pack will instead display warnings, constant reminder bubbles, Read More
Dell Sues Cybersquatters
Dell Inc. is pursuing a major cybersquatting lawsuit against several alleged defendants claiming that the alleged used numerous domain names made up of slight misspellings of well-known trademarks. This method, known as typosquatting, sees domainers register domains that surfers are likely to hit if they misspell a common web site name. Users that misspell the address they intended to load are then taken to Read More
Cellular Tracking Raises Privacy Concerns
E911 location tracking, a service initially mandated by the federal government of wireless providers to track missing persons and for other purposes, is now being used by the wireless providers to earn a profit. Sprint Nextel provides a "loopt" that sends an alert when a friend is near, and Verizon’s Chaperone service allows parents to set up a "geofence" around a defined area and receive Read More
Apple Settles iPod Lawsuit
Apple recently settled a patent dispute with Burst.com for $10 million. Burst alleged that Apple infringed four patents for transmission of compressed audio and video files in iTunes, iLife, QuickTime and the iPod. A similar suit was settled with Microsoft for $60 million previously. The real story of this settlement is the relatively moderate amount of payment from Apple. Particularly given a previous Read More
