Ars Technica is reporting that a federal judge has ruled to allow social security numbers to be posted on public websites, citing the First Amendment and freedom of speech in the ruling.
This decision comes about as a result of privacy advocate Betty Ostergren’s efforts to keep Social Security numbers off of the web. Quoting from the page:
For several years, Virginia has been making the real estate records available for a nominal fee from a commonwealth website. Ostergren, wanting to give public officials a taste of their own medicine, began reproducing the records of legislators and court clerks—Social Security numbers and all—on her website.
[SNIP]
[The Virginia] legislature changed the law to prohibit private parties from distributing individuals’ Social Security numbers even if they are simply reposting the very same records available from the government’s own website. Ostergren viewed this last clause as censorship, and with the help of the Virginia ACLU, she sued to block its enforcement against her.
This ruling evinces the importance of privacy and free speech in current internet case law. As the courts continue to rule about what can be posted online (see, for example, Viacom v. Google), internet privacy concerns will continue to grow.
My recommendation? Be very careful of who you share your personal data with, and make sure you have a service that monitors where your data appears on the web. MyPrivacy scans the internet for you each month.
We’re a low key crew here at ReputationDefender. We don’t order fancy lunches. We wear a lot of company t-shirts around the office and our highly-caffeinated sodas are mostly the Costco variety. So you can imagine our surprise when our friends over at VentureBeat called to inquire about the funding that we took back in January from Maples Investment and others! Well, I guess it’s no longer much of a secret that we’ve really tapped into something important and worthy of attention from a group of smart investors. We’re delighted by the coverage from VentureBeat and are glad for the capital. We will continue to build the best reputation and privacy management tools for the web. Congratulations to our team and to our customers for this exciting step forward.
We were delighted by some excellent coverage from Sonja Carberry and the team at Investor’s Business Daily. The thoughtful article communicates one of the key pieces of an effective online reputation management strategy: be sure to always be vigilant and check in on your own reputation report at least once a month. As we often tell our customers, even if you’re not posting anything special about yourself, you may not know what others are posting about you until it’s too late.
Yesterday, at a Memorial Day gathering, I spoke with a friend about precisely this type of problem. She is a modest user of the Internet and had always been careful to distribute digital pictures of herself to only her close friends and family. Imagine her surprise when a picture of her from a costume party ended up on a blog chronicling professional women behaving badly! Fortunately for her, she noticed the picture before her very high profile employer did and the item has been taken down. If she had simply let that picture sit out on the blog, who knows who might have noticed it and copied it to another site or emailed it on to her boss.
MySpace, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., has recently announced new steps it will be taking to protect the identities of its users. The move comes in response to widespread abuse of the site for such things as online child sex solicitation. This is a very positive first-step toward making the Internet safer for children and teens.
MySpace and attorneys general from New Jersey, North Carolina, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Ohio and New York recognized that an ongoing industry effort is required to keep up with the latest technological developments and to find additional ways to protect teens, so they developed what they are calling “A Joint Statement on Key Principles of Social Networking Sites Safety” that will initially be followed by MySpace but is designed for industry-wide adoption. Cooperation from other social-networking sites is sought, namely from Facebook, which in October reached its own agreement with the New York attorney general’s office over sex offender data on their site.
Specifically, The Principles of Social Networking fall into four categories: Site Design and Functionality; Education and Tools for Parents, Educators and Children; Law Enforcement Cooperation; and an Online Safety Task Force. Each category carries with it several requirements, all geared towards giving legal authorities greater controls for networking sites to prevent predators from using them to contact children. The attorneys general acknowledged that existing standards of law enforcement simply don’t suffice in the rapidly changing climate of the Internet.
“The Internet can be a dangerous place for children and young adults, with sexual predators surfing social networking sites in search of potential victims and cyber bullies sending threatening and anonymous messages,” said New Jersey Attorney General Anne Milgram.
This is certainly a laudable development in the realm of Internet safety for minors. However, we view this move as what should the first of many steps to make the Internet more safe for children and teens. In the near-term, parents should know that this effort is hardly fail-safe. Young children can still be targeted by predators posing as their peers or other “safe” figures. More importantly, MySpace represents but one of many social networks and Internet websites where predatory individuals can target children and teens can be cyber bullied. To truly protect one’s child and learn with whom your child interacts with on the Internet, services like ReputationDefender’s MyChild remain necessary and invaluable.
