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Welcome to Internet Privacy for Dummies!
Welcome to the online companion to our book, Internet Privacy for Dummies, available at bookstores everywhere. If you haven't bought a copy, please click here.
Looking for something you heard about on the radio? Click here for...
Privacy Stories in the Headlines
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Your favorite authors (well, two out of three anyway) are back again with a new book, Fighting Spam for Dummies! Drawing on some of the anti-spam tips first introduced in Internet Privacy for Dummies, John Levine and Ray Everett-Church, joined this time by Margaret Levine Young, teach you why spam continues to grow as a problem, and how you can take control of your email in-box. The book includes lots of step-by-step instructions on how to configure anti-spam features in many popular email programs, and how to install spam filtering on your own computer.
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The chairman of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission said on Tuesday that new anti-spam legislation being considered by Congress won't work, and pointed instead to improved technology as the best hope for eliminating unwanted e-mail. FTC Chairman Timothy Muris told a communications industry conference that some of the legislation moving through the House and Senate "cannot do much to solve the spam problem." It could, in fact, harm consumers by making it harder to prosecute offenders, he said.
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Given up for dead just weeks ago, a landmark privacy bill that restricts what banks and other companies can do with their customers' personal information sailed through the Assembly on Monday and headed for what is expected to be easy approval in the Senate today. Barring a major complication, SB 1 will land on Gov. Gray Davis' desk by Wednesday. He has promised to sign it.
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Consumers wishing to place themselves on the new National Do Not Call Registry can visit http://www.ftc.gov/donotcall or http://www.donotcall.gov to register up to three phone numbers at a time. Online registration requires that you have an active email address in order to verify the registration. If you live in a state west of the Mississippi River (including Minnesota or Louisiana), you can call toll-free, 1-888-382-1222 (TTY 1-866-290-4236), from the number you wish to register. Phone registration will open to the entire nation on July 7. Registration is free.
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In a landmark privacy case, the US Supreme Court voted 6-3 to hold unconstitutional a Texas law that makes it a crime for two persons of the same sex to engage in certain intimate sexual conduct. In doing so, the Supreme Court overturns a 17 year-old decision, Bowers v. Hardwick, in which the court had previously held that states may ban same sex couples from having sex. Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote, "Liberty protects the person from unwarranted government intrusions into a dwelling or other private places. In our tradition the State is not omnipresent in the home. And there are other spheres of our lives and existence, outside the home, where the State should not be a dominant presence."
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Website Privacy Policies that explain a company's Web surveillance habits have done little to dispel confusion among Internet users about how they are tracked online, according to a report released on Wednesday. The dense, legalistic documents that many commercial Web sites post to explain their data-collection habits are more likely to provide false reassurance than clarity to Web surfers, the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center found. In Internet Privacy for Dummies we teach readers how to make sense, at-a-glance, of the arcane language in Privacy Policy documents.
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Across the United States, David Nelsons, dozens of them, are being questioned by ticket agents, pulled off planes and interrogated by FBI agents. The name has been red-flagged in the software used by airlines to screen passengers, and it is wreaking havoc with any David Nelson travelling through the United States. David Nelsons in at least four states say they have been stopped. They include half a dozen in the Los Angeles area, 18 in Oregon and four in Alaska. Even the former child star of ABC-TV's The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet was pulled over for extensive searches and repeated questioning. Perhaps not surprisingly, some David Nelson's report that making reservations as "D. Nelson" avoids the computer alert altogether.
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A pair of unusual political allies, a left-wing Democrat and a conservative religious group, teamed up on Thursday in Washington's latest bid to rid the Internet of spam. Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York joined with the Christian Coalition to announce support for a new bill that would create a national "Do Not Spam" registry of e-mail addresses and, unlike other federal proposals to date, give individuals the right to sue spammers for $1,000 per unlawful message. The bill (known by its tracking number as "S. 1231") has also been endorsed by the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email (CAUCE), which says that although the bill falls short of the preferred "opt-in" standard, the ability for consumers to pre-emptively opt-out and to bring their own private lawsuits for violations promises to give consumers better protections against spam than any other bill currently pending.
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The search engine run by Google.com is pretty powerful, and that power has some people wondering: Is "Googling" good for your privacy? Google was even nominated for a "Big Brother Award" by privacy activists, and numerous articles have been written about whether Google is making it too easy to look into your life. Now the question has arisen: Is Google looking into what you're searching for when you use their service? According to commentator Danny Sullivan, Editor of Search Engine Watch, yes, there are privacy issues when you do a search at Google. But you needn't be worried -- for the moment.
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A broad coalition of privacy, anti-spam, and consumer rights groups wrote to leading Congressional committees calling for a consumer-enforcable Federal prohibition against spamming. In an open letter (now available at http://www.cauce.org/legislation/openletter.shtml) the groups argue that anti-spam measures currently being considered by Congress are too weak because they don't actually prohibit spamming (merely require an opt-out), and don't allow consumers to sue spammers.
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Co-authors John Levine and Ray Everett-Church have been invited to speak at the upcoming Federal Trade Commission public "Spam Forum" on Wednesday, April 30 through Friday, May 2. The workshop is designed to address the proliferation of unsolicited commercial e-mail and to explore the technical, legal, and financial issues associated with it. According to the tentative agenda published on the FTC Spam Forum website, John is scheduled to join a panel entitled "Technological Solutions to Spam/Structural Changes to Email," and Ray is scheduled to join a panel entitled "Federal and State Legislation."
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California State Sen. Liz Figueroa and California Attorney General Bill Lockyer today announced that Californians can begin pre-registering their home and cellular phone numbers on a list that will block most telemarketing calls beginning in October. Figueroa, author of California's "Do Not Call" law said, "This is a great day for Californians who care about privacy. The home invasion will soon come to an end." Although telemarketers will not actually start using the list until October 1, when the law does finally go into effect it will help level the playing field for California consumers, who get their share of an estimated 100 million marketing calls received by Americans every day.
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Go to Google.com, type in your home phone number (10 digits, no dashes, no prefixes). Chances are, your name and address will pop right up. That's not all this new Google feature does. Through the magic of the Web, you can click straight to maps of your neighborhood and driving directions to your home - available to anyone who starts with your phone number. Concerned? You're not alone.
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In a March 25 ruling, the U.S. Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a 1991 federal law against "junk" faxes, saying the law did not violate the fax-senders' First Amendment free speech rights. The three-judge panel overturned a lower court ruling (by Judge Stephen Limbaugh, a relative of talk-show host Rush Limbaugh) that dismissed a lawsuit filed by Missouri's Attorney General and the U.S. government against American Blast Fax and Fax.com. The articles also include comments from Internet Privacy for Dummies co-author Ray Everett-Church!
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A new medical privacy law, a key portion of which takes effect April 14, is creating changes at hospitals, doctors' offices, and insurance companies. Healthcare organizations are scrambling to teach their employees to hang charts with patient names facing toward doors, not into hallways. Screens around computer monitors and new security protocols are keeping computer data from prying eyes. Sign-in sheets are coming with peel-off strips so the next people in line won't see names. And organizations that process insurance payments and healthcare-related billing are having to implement new procedures to assure the privacy of patient records.
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The harm that can be inflicted from the disclosure of a Social Security Number to an unscrupulous individual is alarming and potentially financially ruinous.
-- 4th Cir. Court of Appeals, Greidinger v. Davis (1993) |
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Comments are property of their posters, all the rest
is Copyright © 2000-2004 by John Levine, Ray Everett-Church, and Gregg Stebben.