sharealike.org

For the last year I advised a team of School of Information Masters students (Joshua Gomez, Travis Pinnick, and Ashkan Soltani) on their research into the privacy practices of popular websites. Today they have publicly released their findings on their website: knowprivacy.org.

They found that there is a mismatch between consumer expectations and website privacy practices and posting a privacy policy alone does not bridge that gap. In particular, they’ve shed light on the use of third-party tracking via web bugs. We were surprised to learn that many of the most-visited sites on the internet state in their privacy policies that they do not share information with third parties, but then also state that they allow third parties to place web bugs on their site. Perhaps that’s not “sharing,” but inviting the third parties in to do the collecting themselves achieves the same result: users visit one site and are unaware that information about them and that visit winds up in the hands of an unknown third party.

They also found a surprising dominance by Google in the web bug space. Google operates several trackers and at least one of their trackers appears on 92 of the top 100 most-visited sites in the United States. When one looks at a larger collection of domains (nearly 400,000) that contain at least one web bug, they found a Google tracker on over 88% of those domains. While other tracking companies have good coverage of the most-visited sites, no other company came close to Google’s dominance when the domains considered was broadened.

Through a series of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, they also received data on actual consumer complaints to the Federal Trade Commission and compared those complaints with those gathered from the California Office of Privacy Protection, Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, and TRUSTe. Here they found that consumers want control over the information gathered about them and are particularly sensitive about the public display of that information. One of the take-aways from this is that while the FTC has, in the past, thought about privacy in terms of “harm” users are largely concerned instead with a lack of control.

The full report makes sound recommendations for both website operators and regulators to try to address these issues. The group received some recognition as a finalist in the Bears Breaking Boundaries Science, Technology, and Engineering Policy competition, and a group of outside judges at the School of Information’s Final Project Showcase awarded them a James R. Chen Award for their work. Today, the New York Times has a piece on their research entitled: Google is Top Tracker of Surfers in Study.

• 052109stein.pdf (application/pdf Object)
  (S.D.N.Y. May 14, 2009)
  (tags: Staufer "Brooks Brothers" patent "qui tam" "bow tie" "false advertising")

The UC Berkeley School of Information eScholarship Repository contains publications, preprints, papers, and reports about work conducted under the auspices of the I School. Watch that space.

The Flip Video UltraHD camcorder records files in a .mp4 format. I wanted to convert them to Ogg Theora format. How do you do that? I did far too much searching for an answer to this question for the answer to be this easy:

apt-get install ffmpeg2theora

and then:

ffmpeg2theora vid00001.mp4

That outputs a file called vid00001.ogv and you’re done. Find further information about the fabulous ffmpeg2theora at its website.

• ii.com · Procmail Quick Start: An introduction to email filtering with a focus on procmail by Nancy McGough
  (tags: procmail recipes howto)

Fehrs v. StubHub, Inc., No. 0801-00515 (Ore. Cir. Ct. Sep. 9, 2008) found that StubHub was immune from a state law claim regarding ticket scalping. StubHub was not so lucky in NPS LLC v. StubHub, Inc., 2009 WL 995483 (Mass. Super. Jan. 26, 2009) where commentators at the Berkman Center and Mass Law Blog have been noting that the court appears to have held that “knowing participation” amounts to “material contribution.” The court’s discussion of 230 is brief, but it’s an interesting follow-on to Roommates.com.

As part of the fallout from Facebook’s rollout of its Beacon ad service, some users of Blockbuster’s site sued Beacon-partner, Blockbuster, in the Northern District of Texas, for among other things, violations of the Video Privacy Protection Act. Blockbuster moved to compel arbitration of the dispute, relying on the Terms and Conditions on its site. On April 15, 2009, the district court denied Blockbuster’s motion to compel arbitration, holding that:

there is nothing in the Terms and Conditions that prevents Blockbuster from unilaterally changing any part of the contract other than providing that such changes will not take effect until posted on the website. There [is] likewise… “nothing to suggest that once published the amendment would be inapplicable to disputes arising, or arising out of events occurring, before such publication.”

The court relied largely on the Fifth Circuit’s recent decision in Morrison v. Amway Corp., 517 F.3d 248 (5th Cir. 2008) (holding a similar arbitration provision illusory). The court’s decision here is reminiscent of the Ninth Circuit’s decision in Douglas v. District Court from 2007, where the court addressed whether a service provider may change the terms of its service contract by posting a revised contract on its website without providing additional notice. The Ninth Circuit held there that merely posting a revised contract to one’s website was inadequate notice and the service provider’s customers were not bound by the revised terms.

This is an encouraging trend for website visitors who are increasingly offered extremely one-sided terms on a take-it-or-leave-it basis and then find themselves purportedly subject to terms that can be unilaterally changed with only website notice. At least in these instances, courts are demanding more from website operators.

The case is Harris v. Blockbuster.

• 50 great examples of infographics - FrancescoMugnai.com
  (tags: infographics visualization)

Big day for interesting judicial opinions:
Golan v. Holder, (D. Colo. Apr. 3, 2009).

Congress has a legitimate interest in complying with the terms of the Berne Convention. The Berne Convention, however, affords each member nation discretion to restore the copyrights of foreign authors in a manner consistent with that member nation’s own body of copyright law. In the United States, that body of law includes the bedrock principle that works in the public domain remain in the public domain. Removing works from the public domain violated Plaintiffs’ vested First Amendment interests. In light of the discretion afforded it by the Berne Convention, Congress could have complied with the Convention without interfering with Plaintiffs’ protected speech. Accordingly—to the extent Section 514 suppresses the right of reliance parties to use works they exploited while the works were in the public domain—Section 514 is substantially broader than necessary to achieve the Government’s interest.

Rescuecom Corp. v. Google Inc., (2d Cir. Apr. 3, 2009) (vacating and remanding district court’s decision and finding instead that “The Complaint’s allegations that Google’s recommendation and sale of Rescuecom’s mark to Google’s advertisers, so as to trigger the appearance of their advertisements and links in a manner likely to cause consumer confusion when a Google user launches a search of Rescuecom’s trademark, properly alleges a claim under the Lanham Act.”).

The remarkable thing about the Rescuecom opinion is the 19-page dicta “Appendix” that concludes, “It would be helpful for Congress to study and clear up this ambiguity.”

I just found something on PACER I have not seen reported anywhere.

U.S. v. Arnold is the 9th Cir. case which relied on the border search exception and reversed the C.D.Cal’s suppression of a laptop search at LAX without reasonable suspicion.

Petition for rehearing / en banc was denied a while back and cert was recently denied on Feb. 23, 2009.

I just came across this motion to depublish the opinion (which was denied without opinion on Mar. 16, 2009).

The shocking news is contained in the motion to depublish:

Two days after Arnold was informed by counsel that cert was denied, he committed suicide.