John O’Brien reports: A federal judge has thrown out a class action lawsuit against Ancestry.com before lawyers could get it to trial. Chicago’s Judge Virginia Kendall on Sept. 16 granted summary judgment to the company, which was accused of violating the Illinois Right of Publicity Act when it published old [Read More…]
From EFF: The Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) searches entire zip codes’ worth of people’s private data and discloses it to police without a warrant or any suspicion of wrongdoing, according to a privacy lawsuit filed Wednesday in Sacramento County Superior Court. SMUD’s bulk disclosure of customer utility data turns its entire [Read More…]
Julia Angwin writes: Earlier this year, the head of my son’s middle school called me during the day—which is always a bad sign. My son, it turned out, had been Google searching for news about mass shootings, and the administrators were worried. They were, of course, tracking his Google searches [Read More…]
Joe Cadillic writes: A recent DHS/FBI/NCTC “U.S. Violent Extremist Mobilization Indicators” booklet warns law enforcement that violent domestic extremists are just biding their time to attack them and our democracy. The first sentence in the extremist indicator booklet claims that the U.S. and ‘other Western nations’ face a heightened threat of violent [Read More…]