Some Courts Raise Bar on Reading Employee Email

The Wall Street Journal - Big Brother is watching. That is the message corporations routinely send their employees about using email.

But recent cases have shown that employees sometimes have more privacy rights than they might expect when it comes to the corporate email server. Legal experts say that courts in some instances are showing more consideration for employees who feel their employer has violated their privacy electronically.

Driving the change in how these cases are treated is a growing national concern about privacy issues in the age of the Internet, where acquiring someone else's personal and financial information is easier than ever.
"Courts are more inclined to rule based on arguments presented to them that privacy issues need to be carefully considered," said Katharine Parker, a lawyer at Proskauer Rose who specializes in employment issues.

In past years, courts showed sympathy for corporations that monitored personal email accounts accessed over corporate computer networks. Generally, judges treated corporate computers, and anything on them, as company property.

Now, courts are increasingly taking into account whether employers have explicitly described how email is monitored to their employees.

That was what happened in a case earlier this year in New Jersey, when an appeals court ruled that an employee of a home health-care company had a reasonable expectation that email sent on a personal account wouldn't be read.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125859862658454923.html

New lawsuits asking proof for claims made in ads

The New York Times - Companies that were once content to fight in grocery-store aisles and on television commercials are now choosing a different route — filing lawsuits and other formal grievances challenging their competitors’ claims. Longtime foes like Pantene and Dove, Science Diet and Iams, AT&T and Verizon Wireless, and Campbell Soup and Progresso have all wrestled over ads recently.

The goal is usually not money but market share. Companies file complaints to get competitors’ ads withdrawn or amended.

The cases themselves might seem a little absurd — an argument over hyped-up advertising copy that not many consumers even take at face value. Pantene has attacked Dove’s claim that its conditioner “repairs” hair better, and Iams has been challenged on one of its lines, “No other dog food stacks up like Iams.”
Dueling advertisers, however, argue that these claims can mislead consumers and cause a pronounced drop in sales. Since advertisers are required by law to have a reasonable factual basis for their commercials, their competitors are essentially demanding that they show their hand.

The increase in these actions may be a reflection of the dismal economy: in recessions, when overall spending lags, advertisers must fight harder for customers. “In this economy, where margins are a bit tighter, a lot of marketing departments have decided to become more aggressive in going after their competitors in the hopes that they can either protect their market position or capture additional market share,” said John E. Villafranco, a law partner at Kelley, Drye & Warren who specializes in advertising.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/22/business/media/22lawsuits.html

Protecting Offline Privacy

Wall Street Journal - Washington policy makers, long concerned about how marketers use consumers' personal data to their guide sales pitches on the Internet, have stepped up scrutiny of the increasingly sophisticated ad-targeting techniques used in other media, ranging from mobile phones to TV commercials to the ads consumers get in their mail boxes

In recent years, marketers have grown more adept at culling consumer data from an array of online and offline sources—including real-estate and motor-vehicle records, consumer surveys, credit-card data and logs of Web visitors' online behavior—to identify the most receptive audiences for their ads.

At a hearing Thursday, a House subcommittee plans to explore the impact of these practices on consumer privacy, and will hear from witnesses including advertising giant WPP, database-marketing company Acxiom, privacy advocates and others. Separately, the Federal Trade Commission, which has taken a more active role in policing online privacy this year, is preparing to take a wider look at data-collection practices at a roundtable meeting in December with representatives of the ad, media and technology industries and consumer groups.

"Sometimes overzealous marketers just aren't presenting consumers with an adequate choice and a transparency about what they are doing with information, and we think that is very problematic," says FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz. "If the industry doesn't step up to the plate with vigorous and consistent self-regulation, they are inviting a more regulatory approach," he says.


Mr. Leibowitz cites a settlement the FTC reached with Sears Holdings in June over allegations that the retailer had failed to adequately inform consumers of the extent to which it was monitoring their activities on the Web. A spokesman for Sears said in a statement that it takes the safety of its customers' private information seriously, and that the project in question ended in January 2008. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704533904574543400320693232.html?mg=com-wsj

Chicago's Camera Network Is Everywhere

Workers in Chicago's Office Of Emergency Management

Wall Street Journal - A giant web of video-surveillance cameras has spread across Chicago, aiding police in the pursuit of criminals but raising fears that the City of Big Shoulders is becoming the City of Big Brother.

While many police forces are boosting video monitoring, video-surveillance experts believe Chicago has gone further than any other U.S. city in merging computer and video technology to police the streets. The networked system is also unusual because of its scope and the integration of nonpolice cameras.

The city links the 1,500 cameras that police have placed in trouble spots with thousands more—police won't say how many—that have been installed by other government agencies and the private sector in city buses, businesses, public schools, subway stations, housing projects and elsewhere. Even home owners can contribute camera feeds.

Rajiv Shah, an adjunct professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago who has studied the issue, estimates that 15,000 cameras have been connected in what the city calls Operation Virtual Shield, its fiber-optic video-network loop.

The system is too vast for real-time monitoring by police staffers. But each time a citizen makes an emergency call, which happens about 15,000 times a day, the system identifies the caller's location and instantly puts a video feed from the nearest camera up on a screen to the left of the emergency operator's main terminal. The feeds, including ones that weren't viewed in real time, can be accessed for possible evidence in criminal cases. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704538404574539910412824756.html

Prosecutors go after student journalists sources

The New York Times - Since 1992, Prof. David Protess at the Medill school at Northwestern University has worked with undergraduate journalism students to investigate cases in which prosecutors appear to have taken aim at the wrong people. That might be about to happen again, only this time the students themselves would be the targets.

In one of the most recent cases, students working with the effort, which became the Medill Innocence Project in 1999, uncovered evidence that suggested Anthony McKinney had been wrongfully convicted and imprisoned for almost three decades for the murder of a security guard in 1978.

Mr. McKinney was running by the scene of the crime, was questioned and later charged. He confessed, but later said he had been beaten with a pipe — an interrogation technique not without precedent in Chicago — and forced to sign a confession.

The students found other witnesses who said that Mr. McKinney was not involved in the murder and published their findings on the project’s Web site. They also shared their work with a reporter who wrote an article about the case and forwarded their findings to the Center on Wrongful Convictions at the Northwestern University School of Law, which filed a petition for hearing on Mr. McKinney’s behalf. The case is now before Judge Diane G. Cannon of the Circuit Court of Cook County.

And because of that investigative work — and perhaps work on other cases, which has led to the exoneration of 11 people, 5 of whom had been sentenced to death — the project and its students find themselves in the gun sights of Cook County prosecutors.

“I and some of my former classmates are now wondering if we are going to have to consider going to jail to protect our sources and our notes,” said Evan S. Benn, a writer and editor at The St. Louis Post-Dispatch who worked on the case in his final semester at Medill before graduating in 2004http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/16/business/media/16carr.html