Privacy Journal: Just Published

PRIVACY JOURNAL has published a 2004 Supplement to the 2002 edition of its popular Compilation of State and Federal Privacy Laws (ten pages, $21 plus $4 postage from PRIVACY JOURNAL, P.O. Box 28577, Providence RI 02908, 401/274-7861, fax 401/274-4747, orders@privacyjournal.net. The book and the 2004 supplement together are $31 plus $4). The supplement describes and cites about 150 state and federal laws enacted since the 2002 book was issued.

* Offers of drugs, particularly Viagra, accounted for about 30 percent of global spam messages sent in the first half of 2004, according to a study by Commtouch, a company that sells anti-spam products, www.commtouch. com. Offers for mortgage loans and refinance deals were second in frequency, and organ enlargement offers came in third (seven percent of all spam messages). Pornography and casino ads declined to rates of three percent and one-half percent, respectively. More than a third of all spam evades filters that react to subject headings and recipient names. Only a tenth of all the stuff complies with the new federal law on spam, the survey found.

* eBay is the most trusted company for privacy in America, according to a study conducted by Ponemon Institute and TRUSTe (available from Carolyn Hodge at TRUSTe, chodge@truste.org, 415/618-3415, or www.ponemon.org). Also in the top ten, in order: American Express, Procter & Gamble, Amazon.com, Hewlett Packard, U.S. Postal Service, IBM, Earthlink, Citibank, and Dell. Companies in hospitality and food retailing were not rated high among the 6300 consumers surveyed.

* Ontario's Information and Privacy Commissioner has released "Guidelines for Using RFID Tags in Ontario Public Libraries." The target audiences are vendors and library employees (15 pages, available at www.ipc.on.ca/docs/rfidlib.pdf, 416/326-9883). * * * The Competitive Enterprise Institute has issued "RFID Tags and Privacy: How Bar-Codes-On-Steroids are Really a 98-Lb. Weakling" (12 pages, available at www.cei.org/pdf/4080.pdf). Author Jim Harper argues that economic incentives and consumer preferences will direct the technology's evolution and that legislation is premature.