South Carolina Business Law Blog

I heard the above on a Wired Storybook Podcast interview with Ryan Singel , who is returning as an editor of Wired's Threat Level blog.  One origin for that insight into the price of online services is found here . The knowledge that Facebook and Google and other companies gather and share information about individuals in exchange for their "free" services raises the question again of what kind of privacy we can expect or demand in the information age. In the United States there is no general constitutional right to privacy for personal information. The federal (and to a lesser extent, state) statutory frameworks designed to protect personal information are largely industry-based. For example, HIPAA covers protected health information, Gramm-Leach-Bliley protects consumer financial information, and the Fair Credit Reporting Act and FACTA protect personal credit information. The South Carolina General Assembly recently recognized the value of personal inform

Mobile Applications ("Apps") are suddenly everywhere. Many businesses and software developers, having observed the success of these apps, are eager to join (i.e. cash) in. Often lost in the rush to bring these apps to market are the privacy and security concerns that go along with them. Friend of this Blog John Heitmann at Kelley Drye has a good post on this topic on the Ad Law Access Blog . This post even has a link to a webinar entitled Mobile Applications: Privacy and Data Security Implications .

Good article in the National Law Journal by Marcia Coyle about the City of Ontario, Calif. v. Quon case that the Supreme Court will hear on Monday. SCOTUSblog also has a detailed analysis of the case. At issue is whether a member of the Ontario SWAT team had a Fourth Amendment "reasonable expectation of privacy" in text messages transmitted on his SWAT pager, and whether the senders of messages to the SWAT pager had their own reasonable expectation that the City of Ontario would not review their messages.

A decision from the New Jersey Supreme Court is required reading for any company with a policy setting out acceptable email and online use for its employees. In Stengart v. Loving Care , the NJ Supreme Court addressed how much privacy and confidentiality an employee could expect when she exchanges personal emails with her attorney via a password-protected, web-based email account accessed on a company computer. Loving Care provided Stengart with a laptop to use for company business, from which she had access to the Internet through Loving Care's computer server. Stengart used the laptop to access a personal, password-protected Yahoo email account on Yahoo's website, by which she communicated with her attorney about her work situation. Stengart was unware that the computer's browser software automatically saved a copy of each webpage Stengart viewed-- including each email message she exchanged with her attorney-- on the computer's hard drive. Loving Care had a fo