EHIP

Judge lets privacy advocate keep Social Security numbers on Web Site

Can a state government prohibit an individual from posting Social Security numbers online that were easily and legally obtained from government Web sites?

The answer, a federal judge in Virginia ruled last week, is a definite 'No,' at least for Betty "BJ" Ostergren, a privacy advocate who operates a Web site that posts Social Security numbers obtained from public records.

In a memorandum issued last Friday (download PDF), Judge Robert Payne of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia ruled that it would be unconstitutional for the state of Virginia to force Ostergren to remove from her site Social Security numbers that she legally obtained from public records.

The lawsuit challenged the constitutionality of an amendment to Virginia's Personal Information Act, which forbids the dissemination of any records that contain Social Security numbers, no matter how the records were obtained.

Ostergen, who has been working for several years to force Virginia county governments to redact Social Security numbers and other personal data from records posted online, contended in the suit that the law was passed specifically to curtail her campaign.

Ostergren pointed to at least two U.S. Supreme Court rulings saying that it is unconstitutional to prevent the publication of information -- even sensitive material -- that is legally available in the public domain.

In the 33-page ruling issued last week, Judge Payne held that the same logic applies in the case of Social Security numbers posted on Ostergren's Web site.

"It is difficult to imagine a more archetypal instance of the press informing the public of government operations through government records than Ostergren's posting of public records to demonstrate the lack of care being taken by government to protect the private information of individuals," Payne wrote.

Automated summary from: Computer World

Patient drug data in demand

When most patients go to the pharmacy to fill a new prescription, they don't think twice about turning over the note from their doctor.

Not much to the average consumer -- but to the world's largest drug makers, the information is an invaluable sales tool that they use to track what drugs individual doctors are prescribing all across the country.

Companies like IMS Health have built an industry around gathering prescription data and selling the information to pharmaceutical companies for millions of dollars each year.

Judges in Maine and New Hampshire have handed the companies early victories, declaring laws aimed at stopping the commercial use of prescription data unconstitutional.

Luis Salazar, a privacy specialist in the Miami office of Greenberg Traurig, said he didn't know of any such move yet in Florida, but he wrote in the recent edition of the Privacy Advisor newsletter: 'The outcome could be a case of whither goes New Hampshire, so goes the nation.

''Obviously these companies want doctors to prescribe the medicines they're marketing,'' said New Hampshire Assistant Attorney General Laura Lombardi.

Attorneys for New Hampshire and Maine say their laws, which ban or limit the sale of prescription data, protect the privacy of doctors and patients.

Automated summary from: MiamiHerald.com

Laptop with bank details of over a million Britons sold on eBay

The British government began an investigation Tuesday into how a computer containing highly sensitive bank information of over a million people was sold via online auction site eBay.

A former employee of a data archiving firm put the computer up for sale without erasing the sensitive data earlier this month, reported British newspaper The Daily Mail.

Automated summary from: CBC

Portable Storage Devices Pose IT Security Risk

Baptist Memorial Health Care Corp. in Memphis recently found itself dealing with a proliferation of user-owned plug-and-play USB port drives that posed a security risk to sensitive patient data.

Lenny Goodman, IS director for desktop management at the health care company, said users found it difficult to copy significant amounts of data to floppy disks, and the company "did not allow CD writers."

So users turned to "the USB flash drive, with enormous capacity and zero installation," Goodman said earlier this month.

The result: Baptist Memorial created strict policies around the use of flash memory sticks, iPod music players and other portable storage devices by standardizing on USB memory sticks that have native encryption and password protection.

Automated summary from: Computer World

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Google begins blurring faces in Street View

Google has begun testing face-blurring technology for its Street View service, responding to privacy concerns from the search giant's all-seeing digital camera eye.

The technology uses a computer algorithm to scour Google's image database for faces, then blurs them, said John Hanke, director of Google Earth and Google Maps, in an interview at the Where 2.0 conference here.

Google has begun testing the technology in Manhattan, the company announced on its LatLong blog.

New jurisdictions, new rules Street View poses other privacy issues besides just faces.

Street View presents a view of dozens of United States cities from a driver's perspective (unless a plastic bag is stuck over the Street View camera).

"A just balance needs to be found between what can be publicized, in deference to the principles of freedom of expression and of information, and what has to be safeguarded from excessive public curiosity, so as to avoid infringing the individual's right to privacy and right to his or her picture," the French embassy observes.

Face detection, which humans perform effortlessly with help from some dedicated neurons in the visual cortex, is a decades-old computer science problem.

It's finally arriving in basic form in real-world applications, though, including digital cameras that use it to track and properly expose subjects or take a picture only when subjects are smiling.

Automated summary from: CNET

Google: No such thing as complete privacy

Google's Street View service didn't invade a Pittsburgh couple's privacy, the search giant said in a response to the couple's April lawsuit over the matter.

"Today's satellite-image technology means that...complete privacy does not exist," Google said in its response to the complaint.

They claim these injuries even though similar photos of their home were already publicly available on the Internet, and even though they drew exponentially greater attention to the images in question by filing and publicizing the lawsuit while choosing not to remove the images of their property from the Street View service," Google said in the response.

Automated summary from: CNET

Google finds no privacy on private roads

The service, which gives Web users a driver's perspective of hundreds of cities around the world, has raised the ire of residents who say the images are an invasion of their privacy.

Now residents in California's Humboldt County are complaining that the drivers who are hired to collect the images are disregarding private property signs and driving up private roads.

Webb's experience apparently is not an isolated incident: the newspaper used digital maps provided by the county of Sonoma and found Google had photographed along more than 100 private roads.

Google's claims to be legally allowed to photograph on private roads stems from its assertion that privacy no longer exists in this age of satellite and aerial imagery.

Internet pioneer and Google evangelist Vint Cerf told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in May that "nothing you do ever goes away and nothing you do ever escapes notice."

Automated summary from: CNET

Prescription tracking creates privacy threat

That's the case in the long debate between advocates of a prescription monitoring to prevent fatal drug overdoses and guardians of privacy.

Doctors, public health officials and law enforcement agencies that secure a warrant can see how often a suspected abuser has obtained a prescription for each drug.

Fatal overdoses in New Hampshire have more than doubled in the past decade, thanks in great measure to a dramatic increase in deaths from methadone, a synthetic opioid used to treat severe pain and help wean heroin addicts off that drug.

Abusers go from doctor to doctor and, since a physician has no way of knowing whether another doctor has just written a prescription for the same drug, get multiple prescriptions.

Every New England state but New Hampshire has now approved a monitoring program, so attempts to procure drugs illegally here will likely increase.

And it would likely be a useful tool.

But it's easy to imagine a time when lobbyists could convince lawmakers that the drug problem has become severe enough to grant law enforcement agencies unfettered access to everyone's prescription history without a warrant.

Automated summary from: Concord Monitor

Revealed: 8 million victims in the world's biggest cyber heist

AN INTERNATIONAL criminal gang has pulled off one of the most audacious cyber-crimes ever and stolen the identities of an estimated eight million people in a hacking raid that could ultimately net more than £2.8billion in illegal funds.

A Sunday Herald investigation has discovered that late on Thursday night, a previously unknown Indian hacker successfully breached the IT defences of the Best Western Hotel group's online booking system and sold details of how to access it through an underground network operated by the Russian mafia.

These include: l Armed with the numbers and expiry dates of customers' credit cards, fraudsters are equipped to make multiple high-value purchases in their victims' names before selling on the goods.

l Because the compromised information included future bookings, the gang now has the capacity to sift through the data and sell "burglary packs", giving the home addresses of local victims and the dates on which they are expected to be away from their home.

Although the nature of internet crime makes it extremely difficult to track the precise details of the raid, the Sunday Herald understands that a hacker from India - new to the world of cyber-crime - succeeded in bypassing the system's security software and placing a Trojan virus on one of the Best Western Hotel machines used for reservations.

Given that criminals now have access to all bookings from 2007-2008, and based on the FBI-sponsored Internet Crime Complaint Center's reports that the average victim of internet crime loses £356, they are sitting on a potential haul of at least £2.84bn.

Automated summary from: The Sunday Herald

Writing is on the wall for doctors' e-prescriptions

The move to get doctors to file prescriptions electronically is gathering steam and may get a further boost from new Medicare rules that give doctors money to go electronic --- and take it away if they don't.

From 2004 to 2007, e-prescriptions increased from 700,000 to 35 million, according to the company that routes e-prescriptions from doctors' offices to pharmacies, Pharmacy Health Information Exchange operated by SureScripts.

The government has targeted prescriptions because it is "an area where significant progress could be made quickly," Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt said last week.

Doctors' scrawl will be replaced with typed information, and potentially dangerous interactions with patients' existing medications will be flagged.

Transforming prescriptions from scrawl into a standardized electronic format can make them even easier for pharmacies to sell and trade, violating patient privacy, says Tim Sparapani, senior legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union.

"Any time you put something in a digital format and standardize it, it becomes much more profitable and easy to move those records," he says.

Automated summary from: USA Today