“The European Court of Justice ruled that an individual’s “right to be forgotten” was so strong that Google and other Internet search companies could be forced to remove links even if the information in question was itself accurate and lawful.

The court said links could be removed if they were found to be “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant.” But the ruling provided little guidance to lower courts about how to decide when links should be removed. As a result, it could open the floodgates for people living in the 28 countries of the European Union to demand that Google and other search engines remove millions of links from search results. Such a purge would leave Europeans less well informed and make it harder for journalists and dissidents to have their voices heard.”

– http://ift.tt/1v3O13R

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Microsoft accused the former employee of stealing company trade secrets in the form of software code for the Windows operating system, and leaking the software to a blogger. In an investigation, the company figured out who revealed the information by reading the emails and instant messages of the blogger on his Microsoft-operated Hotmail and message accounts.

While Microsoft’s actions appear to have been legal and within the scope of its own policies, its reading of the private online accounts of a customer without a court order was highly unusual and raises questions about its protections for customer data, privacy lawyers say.

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– http://ift.tt/1oEXsmp

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Government searching of email accounts predates the Obama administration, but Judge Facciola, a former state and federal prosecutor who has been reviewing warrants as a judge since 1997, said he was increasingly concerned about the breadth of government searches. He said he was also troubled by the fact that the Justice Department never said how long it planned to keep the seized data or whether it planned to destroy information that proved irrelevant to the case.

A decade ago, searches were more straightforward. If the authorities had evidence that someone was hiding drugs in a storage unit, for instance, prosecutors applied for a warrant so F.B.I. agents could open the unit, look through the contents and seize any drugs they found.

The Justice Department, however, does not treat email accounts like storage units. Prosecutors asked Judge Facciola for the authority to take everything in the account and search it for evidence of wrongdoing. Even though the government would have everything, it only considered the evidence to be “seized.” The argument is similar to the Obama administration’s justification for collecting the phone records of every American: that the authorities do not know what is relevant until they have reviewed everything.

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– http://ift.tt/1hHhloc

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Doctors do “Google” their patients. In fact, the vast majority of physicians I know have done so. To my generation, using a search engine like Google comes as naturally as sharing pictures of our children or a recent vacation on a social networking site like Facebook. But it surprises me that more physicians don’t pause and think about what it means for the patient-doctor relationship.

What if one finds something that is not warm and fuzzy? I recently read about a case in which a 26-year-old woman went to a surgeon wanting to have a prophylactic double mastectomy, citing an extensive history of cancer in her family. However, she was not willing to undergo any work-up, and her medical team noted several inconsistencies in her story. When they searched online, it turned out she had set up multiple Facebook accounts soliciting donations for malignancies she never had. One page showed her with her head shaved, as if she had already undergone chemotherapy. The surgeons immediately decided to halt her care.

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– http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/06/when-doctors-google-their-patients-2/?ref=todayspaper