Photo by onephoto If we merely politicize the issue of privacy, we’ll never have any. When my first kid was born, I didn’t even have an internet account yet. But somehow, multiple advertisers knew that there was a new baby because we were inundated with direct mail offers for every infant-related product under the sun. Within a couple of years, I joined millions ...
Photo by kentoh By now, you may have encountered a handful of headlines stating that the new, Trump-appointed FCC Chairman Ajit Pai has temporarily halted new privacy rules passed under Obama’s Chairman Tom Wheeler. As a general takeaway, you’re also likely to see statements like “Republicans favor corporations over consumer privacy,” and as with all things under the Trump imprimatur, trust ...
A few posts ago, I reported that the major lobbying muscle in the Internet industry backs a patent “reform” bill (HR 9) called the Innovation Act. I argued in that post that while this reform claims to eliminate nuisance “patent trolls” from clogging up the system with dubious claims, what it really does is eliminate competition from the market. Because, ...
There are certainly many troubling aspects of yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling in the Hobby Lobby case. That the majority opinion rests on upholding the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act has been rightly criticized, particularly by democratic authors of that bill. The protection of religious freedom for individuals was never intended to extend to for-profit corporations, they say; and certainly this ...
As a follow-up to yesterday’s post regarding privacy, the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals laid bare a flaw in the Communications Decency Act 0f 1996, granting websites immunity over liability for content uploaded by individual users. Apparently, it’s a license to exploit people. The case involves former Bengals cheerleader Sarah Jones and defamatory material uploaded to the gossip site thedirty.com. ...
