Or all those bars you ducked into with your date, because the vibe felt right?

Kiss those days good bye.

Bars equipped with SceneTap record all patrons in real time, perform gender & demographic analysis, and publish that data on the web & mobile apps.

So much for the privacy and anonymity of your local bar…

From VentureBeat.com:

Imagine this. You and your girlfriend walk into a neighborhood bar, order a cocktail, and, unbeknownst to you both, a camera above is scanning your faces to determine your age and gender. Your deets are combined with data on other bar patrons and then spit out to looky-loo mobile application users trolling for a good-time venue with the right genetic make-up.This isn’t make believe, folks. Rather, it’s a very real scenario that you may have already experienced thanks to a Chicago-based startup called SceneTap, which went live in San Francisco at 25 bars on Friday.SceneTap is a maker of cameras that pick up on facial characteristics to determine a person’s approximate age and gender. The company works with venues to install these cameras and track customers. It also makes web and mobile applications that allow random observers to find out, in real-time, the male-to-female ratio, crowd size, and average age of a bar’s patrons. And no one goes unnoticed. “We represent EVERYONE in the venue,” SceneTap proudly proclaims on its website.Launched in Chicago last July, SceneTap is now live in seven markets, including San Francisco and Austin, and has tracked more than 8.5 million people at 400 partner venues. Bamboo Hut, Bar None, milk bar, The Abassador, Fluid Ultra Lounge and 20 other San Francisco locations now have the i-spy cameras in place.

via Overexposed? Thanks to SceneTap, San Francisco bars are now profiling you | VentureBeat.

http://nycla.org/index.cfm?section=CLE&page=CLE_Detail&itemID=2682&dateID=20120515

Location: 14 Vesey Street

Faculty:
Program Co-sponsor: NYCLA’s Cyberspace Committee

Faculty: Raj Goel, brainlink.com and Natalie Sulimani, Law Offices of Natalie Sulimani

http://www.dhses.ny.gov/ocs/awareness-training-events/conference/2012/index.cfm

June 5, 2012, 11 am

Social Media has quickly woven itself into the very fabric of everyday life. This boom in sharing, even the most banal of details, has had a resounding impact on how our children, employees and colleagues communicate.

Using case studies from the US and around the world, we’ll examine how people have lost jobs, college admissions, college degrees, fortunes and freedom through (un)social media.

We’ll also investigate the rampant OVERCOLLECTION of customer and subscriber data by major corporations and governments.

We’ll also discuss some strategies and steps we can take to protect civil liberties and privacy in the age of Social Media.

Sep 11, 2012 – ASIS 58

Social Media & Cloud Computing Threats to Privacy, Security and Liberty, Session 3183
http://www.asis2012.org/Pages/Seminar-Home-Page.aspx

Social Media has quickly woven itself into the very fabric of everyday life. This boom in sharing, even the most banal of details, has had a resounding impact on how our children, employees and colleagues communicate.

Using case studies from the US and around the world, we’ll examine how people have lost jobs, college admissions, college degrees, fortunes and freedom through (un)social media.

We’ll also investigate the rampant OVERCOLLECTION of customer and subscriber data by major corporations and governments.

We’ll also discuss some strategies and steps we can take to protect civil liberties and privacy in the age of Social Media.

Social Media & Cloud Computing Threats to Privacy, Security and Liberty

Social Media has quickly woven itself into the very fabric of everyday life. This boom in sharing, even the most banal of details, has had a resounding impact on how our children, employees and colleagues communicate.

Using case studies from the US and around the world, we’ll examine how people have lost jobs, college admissions, college degrees, fortunes and freedom through (un)social media.

We’ll also investigate the rampant OVERCOLLECTION of customer and subscriber data by major corporations and governments.

We’ll also discuss some strategies and steps we can take to protect civil liberties and privacy in the age of Social Media.

Social Media & Cloud Computing Threats to Privacy, Security and Liberty

Social Media has quickly woven itself into the very fabric of everyday life. This boom in sharing, even the most banal of details, has had a resounding impact on how our children, employees and colleagues communicate.

Using case studies from the US and around the world, we’ll examine how people have lost jobs, college admissions, college degrees, fortunes and freedom through (un)social media.

We’ll also investigate the rampant OVERCOLLECTION of customer and subscriber data by major corporations and governments.

We’ll also discuss some strategies and steps we can take to protect civil liberties and privacy in the age of Social Media.

It wasn’t illegal, but it creeped people out.

What I find amusing is that while these guys creeped people out, there are hundreds of developers building similar apps for Law Enforcement, Governments and Corporations that no one’s talking about.

The data YOU share is out there.

Once published, it’s NOT going to be erased.

And lots of people are making fortunes slicing/dicing/mining you to death.

Original article from Forbes:

As far as I can tell, the app “Girls Around Me” wasn’t violating any laws. But it was high on the creepy scale when, according to reports, women’s identity, photographs and location were being revealed to strangers, even though the women never opted into the service. Although the developer, Moscow-based I-Free, hardly deserves any awards, the app’s a good wake-up call for people to use the privacy settings of legitimate social networking and location services.The app mashed together information people posted about themselves publicly on Foursquare and Facebook and created a map showing the location and photographs of nearby women.

via Girls Around Me App Is a Reminder To Be Aware What You Share – Forbes.

The days of small medical practices thinking they were too small for enforcement are (hopefully) over.

From JDSupra.com:

If your company needs another reminder that policies and procedures, risk assessments, documentation and training are critical elements for HIPAA compliance programs, we have another corrective action plan – and monetary fine – that should be utilized as a “teachable moment” for health care providers and business associates alike.

Phoenix Cardiac Surgery, P.C. has agreed to pay a $100,000 fine and implement a corrective action plan under a Resolution Agreement with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office for Civil Rights (OCR) after a lengthy investigation into potential violations of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) Privacy and Security Rules.

OCR investigated the physician practice following a report that it had been posting clinical and surgical appointments on a publicly accessible Internet-based calendar. OCR’s investigation, dating back to 2003, found that Phoenix Cardiac Surgery had failed to implement sufficient policies and procedures to appropriately safeguard patient information. OCR also concluded that the physician practice did not adequately document employee training on the Privacy and Security Rules, identify a security official, conduct a risk analysis, or obtain satisfactory assurances in business associate agreements with Internet-based calendar and email providers. In a press release announcing the Phoenix Cardiac Surgery settlement, OCR Director Leon Rodriquez expressed the agency’s hope that health care providers “pay careful attention” to the Resolution Agreement and the expectation that all providers, “no matter the size,” fully comply with the Privacy and Security Rules.

via The Rising Cost of HIPAA Violations: $100,000 Fine Levied on Physician Group | Mintz Levin – Privacy & Security – JDSupra.

Is using cell-phone data for tracking purposes a violation of privacy? Does it violate any constitutional requirements?

The short answer is: We don’t know. The Supreme Court hasn’t decided yet, though police are clearly doing it all the time. The basic test of what violates the Fourth Amendment is whether the government action is “unreasonable” search and seizure. The Supreme Court has just decided, in the United States v. Jones case, that it’s unreasonable for police to attach a GPS tracker to someone’s car in order to remotely monitor that car’s movements full time for a month, without first getting a warrant.

…

The biggest threats to our privacy nowadays are probably those we create for ourselves, by giving out information to make our lives easier. Through the use of credit cards, email and mobile devices, we allow many private entities to collect all kinds of information about us, and, where it isn’t protected by some statute, those entities can sell that information to anyone willing to pay for it. The Constitution can’t protect us very well against giving our information away.

What obligation do service providers have to give tracking data to law-enforcement agencies, particularly when no warrant has been obtained?

[the cellphone carrier] may be willing to sell that information, if the price is right, and if it thinks that its customers won’t care, or won’t notice.

…

How has the pervasiveness of digital content and growing digital footprints influenced law-enforcement practices? In general, does it complicate or aid criminal investigations?

in addition to GPS tracking (which can be performed by police with a warrant), the government is likely to collect all the electronic information it can get in order to help prove its case: cell-phone data, hard drives, emails, credit card, bank transactions, etc. Digital-evidence collection has vastly increased the amount of data that must be processed, and it requires entirely new kinds of expertise. The courts are still sorting out just how far police can go in looking through someone’s hard drive if they have probable cause to believe that they’ll find incriminating information.

via 3Qs: Mobile tracking in criminal investigations.

Yet in terms of economics, there’s something very wrong with this picture. Generally the demand for easy money outstrips supply. Is cybercrime an exception? If getting rich were as simple as downloading and running software, wouldn’t more people do it, and thus drive down returns?

We have examined cybercrime from an economics standpoint and found a story at odds with the conventional wisdom. A few criminals do well, but cybercrime is a relentless, low-profit struggle for the majority. Spamming, stealing passwords or pillaging bank accounts might appear a perfect business. Cybercriminals can be thousands of miles from the scene of the crime, they can download everything they need online, and there’s little training or capital outlay required. Almost anyone can do it.

Well, not really. Structurally, the economics of cybercrimes like spam and password-stealing are the same as those of fishing. Economics long ago established that common-access resources make for bad business opportunities. No matter how large the original opportunity, new entrants continue to arrive, driving the average return ever downward. Just as unregulated fish stocks are driven to exhaustion, there is never enough “easy money” to go around.

How do we reconcile this view with stories that cybercrime rivals the global drug trade in size? One recent estimate placed annual direct consumer losses at $114 billion worldwide. It turns out, however, that such widely circulated cybercrime estimates are generated using absurdly bad statistical methods, making them wholly unreliable.

Most cybercrime estimates are based on surveys of consumers and companies. They borrow credibility from election polls, which we have learned to trust. However, when extrapolating from a surveyed group to the overall population, there is an enormous difference between preference questions (which are used in election polls) and numerical questions (as in cybercrime surveys).

For one thing, in numeric surveys, errors are almost always upward: since the amounts of estimated losses must be positive, there’s no limit on the upside, but zero is a hard limit on the downside. As a consequence, respondent errors — or outright lies — cannot be canceled out. Even worse, errors get amplified when researchers scale between the survey group and the overall population.

via The Cybercrime Wave That Wasn’t – NYTimes.com.