Privacy in the Digital Age

Jim Dempsey of the Center for Democracy and Technology gave a lecture at Google about the ramifications for privacy in an increasingly digital world. What I found most interesting was the different levels of protection for different content.

For example, a variety of Supreme Court cases have established that "communication on the wire" is protected by the 4th Amendment but that "data at rest" has a much lower level of protection. That is, an email in transit is Constitutionally protected, but when archived on a third-party service, it is not. Statutory protections, like those for medical, financial or education records may, however, exist.

Another interesting dichotomy is that between "content" and "signaling or routing data." The first is more heavily protected than the second. So, the To: field and IP address can be harvested while the message in an email may require a warrant.

There are a lot more good points and the speech is embedded below: