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FTC Warns Site Not To Sell Personal Data
itwbennett writes "The US Federal Trade Commission has warned two people associated with a now-defunct magazine and Web site for gay teens and young men that they would violate the privacy promises the publication made to subscribers by selling their personal information during a bankruptcy proceeding. The FTC, in a letter sent earlier this month, also suggested that the owners of XY Magazine and XY.com would be violating the privacy standards the company had in place before shutting down if they used the subscribers' personal information in a relaunch of the magazine or website. The personal information is listed as part of the debtor's estate in a New Jersey bankruptcy proceeding for Peter Ian Cummings, editor and founder of the magazine. Before the magazine's demise, many of the subscribers lived at home with parents."
Is that a stage name ;-)?
Funny how they cannot sell data, but the US Selective Service "ie draft" seemed to like buying and using data when they wanted it :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farrell's_Ice_Cream_Parlour
The data an American ice cream parlor chain was used to warn young men to register for the draft before their 18th birthday in the early 1980's.
It was all a big Google (mistake) when exposed.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Most teenagers shouldn't have anything to worry about because responsible parents will have programs like Cyber Patrol and CYBERsitter installed to prevent their children and teenagers from accessing these sexually oriented sites. It's funny because under the Australian Internet filter this type of situation wouldn't even be an issue.
[I'll spell this out early on here. I am not a Troll, just offering some political sarcasm, thank you very much. Remember, your Nanny loves you and only wants what's best for YOU].
And this same news was posted expect for the fact that the magazine was substituted with website. "Before the website's demise, many of the subscribers lived at home with parents." -Anonymouse
Even the submission says it's because the company in question had privacy policies in place prior to going bankrupt. They would be violatinig said policies if they give away or sell the data. Listing it as 'assets' in bankrupcy court when they weren't supposed to sell it in the first place was a mistake by them.
The Selective Service has no such polcies.
I'll be buggered if I enter my personal details on a gay teens website!
Given that a petition is an attempt to change the law, people who sign one should be prepared to stand behind it. If you'll pardon the expression.
"Before the magazine's demise, many of the subscribers lived at home with parents."
And this changed how exactly after the bankrupcy of the magazine?
Maybe a bankrupcy of slashdot would be a good thing for the readers too ...
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
My understanding was that the US doesn't have anything like the UK Data Protection Act so the company wouldn't actually be doing anything illegal.
Are these promises worth anything? Would it even constitute a breach of contract, i.e. be grounds for a civil action?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
There is nothing preventing a company from changing its privacy policy after it has obtained your private information. Hell, there's no law requiring that they even adhere to their own privacy policy.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
I'm not sure that's the case. A person may be happy to have their views shared with their elective representative(s) but not with the world at large. I'm not sure a person has to make their views widely public in order to participate in democracy.
Outing people who work to deny others civil rights is a bit different from outing people who were not organizing to do so.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Well, think positively. As more and more people grow up with CS and clones and other online games, soon we'll have a whole generation who thinks "gay" means "got more than one kill with a sniper rifle" or "won the roll on a piece of loot you wanted too".
And for that matter than "I fucked your mom" is the new "good morning, sir. How do you do?" I can imagine a business meeting in 2020 going something like:
CEO: "And now Mr Stevens the VIP of marketing will present the results from the latest market poll."
Stevens: "I fucked your moms, ladies and gentlemen."
Chorus: "Your mom's fat."
Stevens: "As you can see on this graph, after our latest PR campaign, our brand recognition has risen by almost 20% and the sales by nearly 10%."
PHB from the audience: "Dude, you're gay."
Stevens: "Thank you."
At any rate, they'll probably think that having been subscribed to a gay magazine is like subscribing to some gaming tricks site ;)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I can't recall any other case where government forced enforcement of privacy policy on third parties like bankruptcy courts. Even here, it is not clear if FTC is threatening action or just bluffing.
I remember the case of a hospital that stored medical records in a warehouse. They stopped paying rent and the landlord sold the file cabinets including contents to help recover his losses. The cabinets, folders and paper are physical property and property laws govern them. The information on the papers had no legal standing at all.
Even HIPPA laws do not apply to parties who are not heath care providers or their agents but who have possesion of patient data nevertheless.
Current intellectual property law is distinct from ordinary property law. Considering the fact that data possession and data processing are the major source of wealth in the 21st century, we badly need a better legal foundation for information. Traditional property rights, intellectual property rights and contract law all come up short.
Such subscriber information is *not* just a list of NAW data. By its origin a quite important private piece of information is tagged to each-and-every of those peoples records : They are homosexual.
If-and-when the list is used for its *by the subscribers* intended purpose (to be able to send the magazine and subscription-fee invoices to their subscribers) there is no problem.
But if this list is *not* used for that purpose it should fall faul of the current rules regarding the aggregation of peoples data : NAW is allowed, anything more specific is, without the consent of the person, not.
If this is not strictly regulated it would be easy to create a full database with every detail you want by becoming a "partner" of any company who, by its function, implicitily tags private information to its NAW data-list.
I disagree. Anonymous votes (and petitions are the same in this case) protect people from coercion, and therefore is freer.
If petitions (and other votes) are open, you might be compelled to sign them for other reasons other than your political beliefs.
Dilbert RSS feed
Of course you have to make your views public if you want to participate in a democracy. Everything but your vote should be public.
Especially political petitions. If you sign a petition, you are expressly making a public statement of your views on a subject. Otherwise, signatures on a petition could never be challenged.
Why would you sign a petition and then expect the fact that you signed a petition to be private?
First off, I used to be a member of that website, until it rolled downhill and everyone started using other social networks.
The magazines were non pornographic and aimed at gay youth. They didn't feature nudity and were sold at stores like chapters.
It had TONS of subscribers and at one point I would have believed it to be the largest gay social network. Not everyone would have their financial information or true information on the site, although it did end up possessing a ton of information about users.
Another day, another Kosian post on Slashdot.
You can't sell what isn't yours to sell. Period.
No story here. Oh, it's about gays or computers or ...
This is the year 2010. The novelty of being gay or involving computers is so Carter administration.
It's true that sometimes people do fear retribution for political actions, and justifiably so, but the only way to foster an open discourse, where social norms don't favor revenge or retribution, is to be open about one's beliefs and contribute to healthy debate.
Can I mod something +1 Scary if it's true but I wish it weren't?
You may disagree, but you're wrong. Petitions are opened so that the people can know who it is that's putting it up for a vote. In a vote, people know that the candidate that is running is behind it, and there's usually a listing of endorsements. The Republican party thought that it was clever to switch our county elections to non-partisan so that they could slip in one of their candidates undetected. It didn't work, the people saw through it. Turns out that folks in this county don't want to vote for that sort of trash.
The petitions here in WA have been open for a good long time, and there has never been any evidence that doing so subjected people to undo influence or coercion. Even in this case the names for those that funded the referendum there is no evidence that they underwent any illegal harassment or other problems.
I'm sorry, I'm going to have to call you out on this, because you're begging the question.
The entire debate is whether or not gay marriage is a civil right in the first place. The people who signed the petition don't believe that it is (otherwise, they wouldn't have signed it).
No one is trying to prevent people from exercising their civil rights. They are, however, trying to prevent people from perverting an existing institution designed to build families.
I already know the response ("two consenting adults") so save it - by that logic, is it a civil right for a mother to marry her son?
One of the targets of the FTC letter is the majority owner of the company that published XY (as the story says). The other target of the letter was an investor in XY. The assert ownership of the data.
Grant Gross, Washington reporter, IDG News Service
..but when did my private information provided to a publication become the PROPERTY of said publication, which can be SOLD?
I know that most of us fail to read the "fine print" on privacy disclosures when signing up for sites, but this seems pretty bold even by scummy info-harvesting standards.
Also, what about sites where you actually do business? I can understand shady sites like Facebook, MySpace or Xanga selling info to stay afloat. I can even understand scummy pseudo-free sites like blogTV, Stickam and Tinychat gathering information and selling it to god-knows who. But what about sites like Newegg and Amazon? There's almost NO WAY to do business with these sites without giving up private information. Is my information theirs, and they can do whatever they want with it? If Newegg ever goes bankrupt, will they pimp their customer database to the penis enhancer/herbal viagra/discount rolex spammer crowd?
And they say I look funny in my tin hat when I try to protect my privacy. Sheesh!
It's interesting how government upholds private contracts when it wants to, and violates them when it wants to, as in the bankruptcies of GM and Chrysler, which involved overturning longstanding, traditional contracts with lenders to give certain lenders a larger share of the cut-up pie upon dissolution.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Sadly you are mistaken. People do not reconsider beliefs often. In fact attempting to change deeply held convictions can cause cognitive dissonance since many other decisions have been based on that belief. In fact, people with deeply held beliefs often hold those beliefs even more strongly in the face of proof to the contrary. http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/07/11/how_facts_backfire/
But that is beside the point. There is no petition here, this article is about the potential outing of a million gay teens. Which could result in eviction, abuse, and other forms of harm. The FTC made the right call I just wish that consumer protections were more broad. Rather than "you can't do this as it violates your privacy policy" I would prefer "you can not sell consumer information as it could do harm".
Imagine if facebook or myspace decided to mine and sell your data. "Ehh who cares, they already do." But studies suggest they can determine where you live, your sexuality, what you are interested in via your connections. So now even if you keep your data private they can probably figure out your birthday, orientation, former residences, etc. Now imagine if you are an actor or musician and have too many gay friends so they sell your info to a anti-gay group that starts protesting at your work and calling your family/friends/co-workers. You lose business partners, sponsorships, your family starts to wonder what you are hiding...
You can not reason with a mob, they have others reinforcing their opinion and peer pressure would prevent most people from backing down. Only a culture of tolerance and/or stronger consumer protection would make this less likely. Right now we have neither. We are sometimes inching towards more tolerance but then I see anti-gay, anti-immigration, anti-Muslim, anti-intellectual materials and I despair.
Anonymous votes (and petitions are the same in this case)
Well no, a petition is not a vote. There is the important difference in that a vote is open to all, scheduled, and is usually a periodic or reactionary thing. A petition is pro-active, and self-selective. A vote shows you the will of the majority. A petition shows you the voice of the minority. You don't need a petition if you can get more then half the populace to sign it.
It didn't make sense to me at first, but secret voting does seem to be a good idea. It fixes some of the problems we've had in the past. Secret petitions would simply undermine the whatever legitimacy that petitions have.
No one is trying to prevent people from exercising their civil rights. They are, however, trying to prevent people from perverting an existing institution designed to build families.
So would you be in favour of prohibiting the marriage of heterosexual persons who do not plan on raising children?
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
I assumed they would have to be accessed by a court or whatever to verify it, but not to the general public, if requested by the person that signed it.
Dilbert RSS feed
That is all nice if you assume you live in an open society where debate is accepted and people respect others' contrary opinions. But the reality is often very different.
How many people have been persecuted or at least ostracized for defending different views that the majority? How many kids have been discriminated for their parents' opinions?
Social pressure alone is enough to ensure that people, if forced to openly defend their opinions, and especially if they have children or other close family, will prefer to shut up and don't sign the petition even if they agree with it.
In the end you'll have a more effective majority dictatorship and weaker minority opinions.
Dilbert RSS feed
You can't sell what isn't yours to sell. Period.
Yes, but is it your information they're holding for a particular purpose (sending you a magazine), and thus your property or is it their information simply about you, and thus their property?
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
No one is trying to prevent people from exercising their civil rights. They are, however, trying to prevent people from perverting an existing institution designed to build families.
So would you be in favour of prohibiting the marriage of heterosexual persons who do not plan on raising children?
Sigh. Do I have to explain this in small words?
It says it right there in the bit you quoted: marriage is an institution designed to build families. Just because a couple doesn't plan on building a family doesn't mean that they shouldn't be encouraged to do so.
Now I already know where this is going to go. You're going to suggest that gay couples can have children via adoption or other means.
Well, that's nice, but studies have conclusively proven that children do best in stable, nuclear families. We shouldn't be encouraging people to bring children up in bad situations.
Which is why marriage, as an institution, is designed to help create stable family units that bring children up in the best manner possible.
Is it perfect? Of course not. But just because it isn't perfect doesn't mean we should make it demonstrably worse.
Sigh. Do I have to explain this in small words?
It says it right there in the bit you quoted: marriage is an institution designed to build families. Just because a couple doesn't plan on building a family doesn't mean that they shouldn't be encouraged to do so.
Now I already know where this is going to go. You're going to suggest that gay couples can have children via adoption or other means.
So any heterosexual person that is unable to have children (say the man had testicular cancer and now can't get her pregnant) should not be allow to marry? Same level of reproduction as a homosexual couple.
Well, that's nice, but studies have conclusively proven that children do best in stable, nuclear families. We shouldn't be encouraging people to bring children up in bad situations.
Total hate mongering bullshit.
Which is why marriage, as an institution, is designed to help create stable family units that bring children up in the best manner possible.
Is it perfect? Of course not. But just because it isn't perfect doesn't mean we should make it demonstrably worse.
And yet for many families, marriage is an 'institution', just like a prison institution due to abusive parents that people demand must stay together 'for the children' which only makes it a horrible place to be for the children.
Do you have any trustworthy sources? (Seriously? About.com?)
So any heterosexual person that is unable to have children (say the man had testicular cancer and now can't get her pregnant) should not be allow to marry? Same level of reproduction as a homosexual couple.
Of course not, because you're looking at edge cases. Is this really that hard to understand?
Sure, you can find edge cases where a true marriage might not result in building a family.
There are absolutely no gay marriages that can build a proper family.
If you can't see the difference between a few fractions of a percent and 100% - well, it's not worth talking to you.
Do you have any trustworthy sources? (Seriously? About.com?)
Well, I already showed the NewScientist one, so I'm guessing you missed that one, how about these? 1 2 3 4 Or are these not good enough for you? I'm of course assured you have many trust worthy sources that can show that a gay couple raise horrible children? You have yet to show one granted, but I'm sure its just because your saving the best for last.
Sure, you can find edge cases where a true marriage might not result in building a family.
There are absolutely no gay marriages that can build a proper family.
If you can't see the difference between a few fractions of a percent and 100% - well, it's not worth talking to you.
Many edge cases? Ignoring that oxymoron, its not as uncommon as you seem to want to insist on. The issue with abuse and bad parenting is not many people speak up about it but it happens more then enough that its a well know issue that these things happen in heterosexual couples (and is well documented from MANY cases, not 'edge cases' like you wish to dismiss them as). Granted I don't see many, if any, issues of home abuse by gay/lesbian couples, so it kinda shows that the more toxic homes are the heterosexual ones :)
Also, what is your definition of a 'proper family'? What the bible tells you? Bible tells many things, with many of them contradicting itself, like Exodus 20:13 "Thou shalt not kill.", only to have Jesus himself command you in Luke 19:27 to "But those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring them hither, and slay them before me". So much for don't kill. When you put your morals in a religion, you need to question what it says and not blindly follow. This happened in the Dark Ages and is now forever known as the worst times in history.
That's irrelevant. The information is an asset and they aren't free to dispose of the assets.
Addresses are not private property, even if the road and all surrounding land are private property. Addresses are a function of license to use the road which comes from the government.
It's similar to the way a font can be copyrihted but IP ownership of letters, themselves, is impossible.
Hmmm...well...that's more interesting than I first thought. One way to view this is the FTC is trying to prevent selling of assets because there was a privacy clause? I guess they'd pursue this as fraud?
This is a very important legal issue, much broader than its narrow “gay” context, and the FTC is right! Some bankruptcy courts have permitted companies in Chapter 7 or 11 bankruptcy to sell the private information their members or customers have shared with them, in reliance upon privacy policies and guarantees, free and clear of those privacy guarantees to raise money for administrative expenses and to pay creditors. This is not that new an issue, but is one calling for such attention. It is generally accepted today that purely personal and private information, the public disclosure of which would be highly offensive to a hypothetical reasonable person of ordinary sensibilities, is subject to rights of privacy which have developed at common law and by statute. The late conservative Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote at least one of the key Supreme Court opinions establishing this point. Contrary to the impressions of some posters here, the issue and potential legal precedent here transcends the "gay teen" context in this particular bankruptcy proceeding and is very likely to affect an awful lot of us "straight" adults, not to mention teens, Consider just a few of the possibilities, e.g., a site for, for example: Survivors of childhood sexual assault including incest; Survivors of sexual assault as adults; Persons with medical conditions; Persons with mental health issues; Lawyers, doctors, hospitals, drug makers or testing labs, or pharmacies, medical records storage and retrieval firms, etc. who go bankrupt holding your personal, private, and confidential data; Personal or business financial data transfer or storage; Persons seeking lawyers or legal advice; I’ve been there. Trying to check some data on Russian – Argentine trade for an academic research paper when both currencies had multiple exchange rates and were legally non-convertible got me on a CIA list of suspected Soviet spies, long before the Internet, and our government kept me on that list and lied to my U. s. Senator and me about it for a generation before finally admitting it to me, years after they said then that they had told Nelson Rockefeller about it. . My law practice very unexpectedly came to involve representing an awful lot of survivors, and a few perpetrators, of aggravated sexual abuse of a child, mostly heterosexual incest. Some were members of the immediate and near extended families of, and molested by, prominent persons including elected and high appointed officials palmed off on us by both political parties, who, of course, never got investigated much less busted. Childhood incest survivor clients of mine, and I, have had occasions to go to, register, and post on sites we hope nobody ever connects us with. I have also represented a “gay” teen charged with the murder of a “gay” adult, among other occasions I have had to research both sides of controversial “gay” issues. The first time I addressed a committee of the Texas Legislature in support of a bill protecting the privacy of individuals undergoing psychotherapy, and my proposed amendment to ensure that this would cover group therapy sessions with or without the licensed therapist present but at his direction, not one member, practically all lawyers, realized that Texas did not yet have any settled legal protection for the privacy and confidentiality of doctor-patient communications yet. HIPAA notwithstanding, there are still an awful lot of gaps, not to mention unsettled areas, in medical and psychological, among other areas of, privacy law. I read on one computer-related site, to which I have lost the citation, that legal counsel for one of the large companies developing computerized medical records, proposed by Bush and provided for in the new PPAPA “healthcare” bill, has said that HIPAA does not protect the privacy of such stored records. Sale in bankruptcy of personal and private data obtained under a promise of privacy protection presents a very different issue than the closer one, t
There are absolutely no gay marriages that can build a proper family.
Really? Reality is disagreeing with you.
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content/abstract/peds.2009-3153v1
http://www.apa.org/pi/lgbt/resources/parenting.aspx
If you can read German or Spanish, here's a couple more
1
2
I can link some more if you like.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time