Stanford researcher Jonathan Mayer, in an email to the Wall Street Journal’s Elizabeth Dwoskin and Rolfe Winkler:

Courts are doing pretzel twists to slot modern electronic privacy issues into antiquated statutory schemes. Congress badly needs to update the nation’s privacy laws; we can’t leave the courts with so little guidance and expect consistent results.

The inconsistent application of the law across states suggests the issue may be ripe for appeal on both fronts, and may be on a long journey to the Supreme Court. The Delaware court saw no harm in Google’s circumvention of browser-based privacy settings and thus no cause of action.

What interests me is that the information you can collect via someone’s browsing behavior with a cookie is probably similar to the information you can collect by scanning their email, the action at issue in the North Carolina case, in which the judge denied Google’s motion to to dismiss the suit.

Thus, it’s the difference in the method of collection, even where the subject of collection is the same, that may be triggering the proliferation of multiple interpretations of privacy law.

Of course, it’s worth noting that the wiretap law refers specifically to communication interception, which applies directly to email. While browsing history can tell a great deal about someone, it’s not, strictly speaking, a mode of communication, so plaintiffs probably need to rely more on the common law.

I wish I had more time to sink my teeth into the issue, but I’ll have to settle for sharing a few useful links on privacy law for those interested in learning more:

• EFF on Privacy
• Wikipedia, particularly good for the history of privacy law in the U.S.
• Prof. Daniel Solove: The Chaos of U.S. Privacy Law
• Michael McFarland, SJ: Privacy and the Law

Google apologists like myself often answer concerns that the search-and-advertising giant can scan your email with something like “yes, but they’re doing it with robots and scrubbing it clean of all identifying information.”

China, however, is not so concerned with your privacy or its own image. In fact, monitoring otherwise-harmless civilians probably proves valuable to the renegade nation by illustrating the best means of tricking US netizens into installing backdoor viruses on their systems.

The most important point this article makes, in my view, is that China is playing the long game on cyberespionage efforts. As David Feith reports in the Wall Street Journal piece linked to above:

The essence of China’s thinking about cyber warfare is the concept of shi, he says, first introduced in Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War” about 2,500 years ago. The concept’s English translation is debated, but Mr. Thomas subscribes to the rendering of Chinese Gen. Tao Hanzhang, who defines shi as “the strategically advantageous posture before a battle.”

They’re not going to take down any infrastructure any time soon, but if and when they want to, their current efforts will probably go a long way to helping them learn how to do it.

This stuff is not just a headline: it’s been happening for some time, is still happening, and is likely only to increase. Mr. Feith’s article at the Journal is well worth reading.

WSJ was wrong to pretend potential Facebook hashtags are news, and everyone reporting about a similar move by Flickr is just as wrong.

What makes this even less news is that Flickr has so far only started calling their longtime tags feature “hashtags” in their iOS app.

I love that this is “news” at the Wall Street Journal. Perhaps the only news-worthy aspect of this story is that it’s one of those rare instances where Facebook is the one keeping up with the Joneses, instead of the other way around.

When will this vaunted hashtag implementation be completed? No one knows, despite WSJ's having talked to some of those ubiquitous and ever-informative “people familiar with the matter.”

What I think is really wonderful about this non-story is that it took not one but two people at WSJ to produce it, Evelyn M. Rusli and Shira Ovide. I don’t pretend to know the usual caliber of those journalists’ work, but I hope, for their sake, that the topic of this blurb is uncharacteristically dull.

Tor gets a headline at WSJ.com.

Ian Sherr, writing for the Wall Street Journal:

In cross-examination, Mr. Forstall said Eddy Cue, now head of Apple’s Internet services efforts, had used a 7-inch Samsung tablet for a time, and sent an email to Chief Executive Tim Cook that he believed “there will be a 7-inch market and we should do one.”

While the rumor mill is still citing anonymous sources, this quote, for me, seals the deal. If Apple thinks there is a market (and at least one of its high-ranking executives does), and Apple thinks it can dominate that market (and they already dominate the ~10 inch tablet market), Apple will enter that market.