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GCN Home > 09/17/07 issue

Kevin Bankston | New threats to privacy

GCN Interview with Kevin Bankston of the Electronic Frontier Foundation

By Patrick Marshall

As a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, one of Kevin Bankston’s primary responsibilities is to monitor the effects of new technologies on citizens’ privacy rights and occasionally undertake litigation to protect those rights. Recently, he experienced the issue firsthand when he was, without his knowledge, photographed by Google Street View, and his image was posted online.

GCN: There have always been threats to privacy. How has technology affected those threats?

Bankston: Certainly, applying the law to any new field is going to be fraught with risks and difficulties. And certainly, many of the technologies that we’re grappling with now are brand new.

So we have to do our best to craft analogies to already existing doctrines as applied to already existing technologies. Sometimes that works well. Sometimes it doesn’t.

A key example would be our amicus brief to the 6th Circuit in the case of Gorshof v. U.S., where we argued that people have a reasonable 4th Amendment expectation of privacy in their e-mail that they store with their third-party provider. They have just as much expectation [of privacy] in that as they do with their phone calls, which are strongly protected by the 4th Amendment. We succeeded in convincing the court of the aptness of that analogy.

More information is being generated and collected and stored; in particular, information that is highly sensitive and revealing. There has never been a document — ever in the existence of humanity, I think — that is more revealing of the interior concerns and nature of a person than, say, a log of all their Internet search activity. This was born out by my examination of search logs that were “accidentally” disclosed by AOL last year in a frighteningly irresponsible data leak. They released search log histories of several hundred thousand of their users over a three-month period. Looking through those logs, it was clear that people treat their search engine like their most trusted confidante, seeking advice on practically every personal, medical, financial or familial problem you can imagine. So with new technologies, there are new privacy threats which I would say are graver than any we’ve faced before.

The logs were attributed to unique numbers, so the person’s user name was not shown, but a number of those histories revealed the searcher based on what was searched for. The New York Times located and interviewed a particular woman based on her search history. And if you search your own name in Google, the first thing on your first page of results is your own search history.

More news on related topics: Communications / Networks, Content / Record Management, Data Management



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