The economy is so bad in Argentina that the government recently said it would start taxing overseas credit card purchases. It also demanded that banks report all credit card transactions -- foreign or domestic -- saying the data would be used to find tax cheats.

Even George Orwell couldn't have imagined this meeting of Big Brother and Big Data: a handy database of every single purchase made by citizens, ready to be categorized and analyzed by the government.  Let your mind wander for a moment and you can imagine the disturbing possibilities of a government so invasive that it knows when and where you buy milk and bread. 

The obvious question: Could it happen here?  There are grand cultural and economic differences between Argentina and the United States, but if the history of privacy tells us anything, it is this: Governments and corporations can rarely resist the temptation of using technology to gain the upper hand.

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"This gives me chills," said Gartner banking consultant Avivah Litan, who was in Argentina recently consulting with that nation's government banking officials. "I think it is a reminder that our data can be looked at by anyone and probably is being looked at."

Argentina is not the first government to examine credit card receipts. In 2011, Brazil began taxing overseas credit card transactions. And Spain recently outlawed cash transactions over $2,500, a tactic that forces consumers to use traceable, electronic purchasing tools for big-ticket items. 

Big Brother is not behind these drastic measures. In Argentina, where only about 50 percent of the population buys with plastic, a currency crisis and high inflation have led to a dramatic rise in overseas purchasing. Taxing foreign purchases is an attempt to stem this tide, and encourage domestic spending. Brazil's motivation is similar. 

But once the pipeline for data is established and the database is built, what's to stop mission creep? Argentina has said it will examine domestic transactions for evidence of undeclared purchases or other signs of tax evasion. What else could a government find in a database of transactions?

"When I first saw the story it kind of took my breath away," said Bill Hardekopf, who operates the credit card information website LowCards.com "I thought, 'Oh my, a government can track the purchases of every one of their citizens?' " 

There is a way to avoid becoming a line item in a government credit card transaction spreadsheet: pay with cash, something one in two Argentinians still does. But in the U.S., cash has become passé. Last year, only 27 percent of point-of-sale purchases were made with cash, compared to 66 percent for credit and debit cards, according to Javelin Strategy and Research, which expects that number to dip to 23 percent by 2017.  

Meanwhile, a host of new payment tools -- still rough around the edges -- are about to find their way into consumers' pockets and purses. Mobile cellphone payments are coming of age, with a quarter-trillion in annual transactions expected by 2016, according to IE Market Research.  And even the simplest of cash transactions -- "Buddy, can I borrow $5?” -- might not be long for this world.  Starbucks recently partnered with Square, a simple tool that allows cellphone users to accept casual payments from friends or small business clients. The convenience of such tools is undeniable; so is their traceability.  

"As we become more and more of a cashless society, the likelihood of purchases being tracked increases. Whether that is used for negative purposes, or will cause personal privacy issues, I don't know, but I can see the possibilities," Hardekopf said. 

But could it happen in the U.S.? Hardekopf said he had trouble imagining Washington could get away with the Argentinian tactic. He believes privacy interest groups would scream, other safeguards would kick in and the U.S. population just wouldn't swallow it.

But there are no laws preventing this kind of information sharing between banks and government agencies, Litan points out. Law enforcement officials routinely obtain personal information, such as cellphone locations and credit card receipts, during the course of criminal investigations.

"The (U.S.) government does have access to this information now because it regulates the banks," she said. "There's no secrecy laws like there are in Switzerland. There's no privacy laws that would prevent this."

Dan Mitchell, an economist at the libertarian Cato Institute, said there have already been attempts by both state and local governments to more broadly obtain detailed consumer financial data. The health care reform bill included a provision that required merchants to report credit card processing volume data to the IRS, for example.  And recent efforts by states to enforce sales tax on online purchases will necessitate detailed reporting on credit card transactions by merchants, he warned.

“So it's just a question of expanding the existing set of Orwellian laws,” Mitchell said.

Probably the strongest firewall against such an intrusion would be banks themselves, which would no doubt fight massive data requests.  But transaction data sharing from banks to government officials has risen sharply since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The number of Suspicious Activity Reports filed by banks with their federal regulators has soared from 281,000 in 2002 to 1.5 million in 2011 (.pdf), according to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. Much of that increase can be attributed to a rise in mortgage fraud, but it demonstrates a dramatic increase in cooperation between banks and government officials. There also is a long history of federal authorities buying access to large troves of consumer data – such as the one once operated by commercial data broker ChoicePoint, now owned by the same firm which operates Lexis-Nexis.

That's why privacy expert Rob Douglas says that Argentina's data sharing is not an isolated incident.

"Given the explosion in the collection and retention of personal data by governments around the world under the guise of national and economic security, I fear the Argentine model is where all countries - including the U.S. - will end up under one scenario or another," he said. "After all, government by its very nature constantly seeks to know more about the governed. With the ever-expanding ability to store and sift vast amounts of personal data, it's inevitable that governments will do so unless reined in by the governed."

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 More from Red Tape Chronicles:  

 

• Industry group says cellphone bills are shrinking; is yours?
• When you and your employer split, who gets friends and followers?
• Mom forces TSA to shell out $3.99 for confiscated peanut butter
• Why your next 'Passw0rd' may not be a password
• Airlines charge passengers 'you-get-to-sit-with-your-kids' fee
• Revealed: The real source of Apple IDs leaked by Anonymous
• The truth comes out: CEO says 'stupid' consumers deserve big fees
• Firms' deletion of online critiques draws cries of 'censorship'
• Poll: Cellphone users dump apps to spare privacy, then lose phones
• At Tampa convention, protesters can carry guns, but not puppets

 

 

 

 

When the Olympic flame is doused on Sunday, we know the cheers will quiet, the athletes will move on and fans will go home. But will Big Brother stay behind?

Every Olympics host city goes through it: the Olympic hangover. When the athletes step off the medal podiums, the city must clean up, pay the bills and figure out how to monetize a series of shiny new venues. The most important decision, however, might seem much more subtle: What happens to all those new security cameras and other surveillance technologies that were installed for the Games? Privacy experts fret that, as with Athens, Beijing and Vancouver, the Olympics means a steep ratcheting up of security that never really gets ratcheted down.

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"It would be a tragedy if the most visible legacy of the Games in London was a huge increase in the amount of surveillance people are subjected to in their everyday lives," said Nick Pickles, director of London-based Big Brother Watch.

Host cities tolerate massive shows of security that would otherwise be unimaginable. In London, which already has more CCTV security cameras than any other city in the world, 2,000 new cameras were installed in the Olympic Village, while nearly 2,000 more were installed around the city, according to Big Brother Watch. License plate recognition systems have been installed throughout London. There are even surface-to-air missiles atop apartment buildings and more military troops on the ground than Britain has in Afghanistan. An $877 million effort, it's been called the largest peacetime deployment of security forces in history, but the question remains: Will there be mission creep? How much of that infrastructure and the public’s newfound tolerance for being watched will remain after the Games are finished?

Earlier this year, the Electronic Frontier Foundation published an analysis of all recent Games and says the results are disheartening.  It should come as no surprise that the Beijing Summer Games were used as an excuse to install thousands of cameras that are still in operation, said the report’s author, Rebecca Bowe. But other cities have suffered similar fates, too.

"The Games bring a legacy that lives well beyond the prestige," Bowe said. "We've witnessed time and again, the security infrastructure lives on well beyond the Games."

Concrete concerns
The concerns aren't merely theoretical. Athens officials installed about 1,000 cameras for the 2004 Summer Games. In 2007, Greece amended its national data protection law to exempt the cameras; Greek privacy commissioner Dimitris Gourgourakis resigned over the incident. The cameras have since been used during protests following economic unrest there.

More Olympics coverage in London 2012: Hosting the Games

The Olympics has a long-running legacy as a massive security event, which long pre-dates post-9/11 terrorism concerns. It dates at least as far back as the Munich Summer Games of 1972, when a security breach contributed to the kidnapping of Israeli athletes from the Olympic Village; 11 were eventually murdered.  But even before that event, the Olympics were never free of international politics and the real possibility that some group might use them to violently make a point.

No one disputes the need for heightened security during the Games, but is the installation of security infrastructure, and the culture that comes with it, a one-way street? Can a security state be dismantled? Or are the Games a Trojan horse that allows those with a heavy-handed security agenda to gain the upper hand?

Olympic security plan transforms London into fortress

"The equipment has been bought and paid for. The real risk is they simply leave it in place and turn it over to local authorities, and by the back door, we have a huge increase in surveillance," Pickles said. "Government officials have made assurances that some of it is temporary, but they haven't said what."

Already, whiz-bang security technology in London has proven tempting to local authorities. Pickles pointed to minutes from a recent borough council meeting in Newham, just east of London, where officials openly expressed desire to buy Olympics surveillance technology after the Games end.

Alfredo Lopez, founder of the international privacy advocacy organization MayFirst/PeopleLink, said it's very difficult to reverse the Olympics security buildup.

"There is no way these guys are going to take down those cameras, especially with all the social unrest there," said Lopez, who is based in New York.

Lopez, a professed lover of Olympic sports, said the security issue threatens to squander any of the goodwill gained by the otherwise-peaceful international gathering.

Red Tape Chronicles on NBCNews.com

"I happen to believe, and I know this is corny, (that) the Olympics is one of the greatest things the human race does, so why do these bastards pervert it with their repressive attitudes?" he said. "How can you run a principal event of goodwill and friendship, then at same time, on top of buildings you have missiles? It's totally incongruous. It's very, very disturbing and contradictory to the Olympic spirit. It ruins the whole thing."

'It softens people up'
One fundamental problem of the Games is that they are used as an "obvious show of military capability," Lopez said, with host nations using the occasion the beat their chests about their powerful ability to respond to threats. But Pickles is worried about a much more subtle issue: Residents get used to the trade-off between privacy and heightened security practices, and their tolerance level is slowly raised, leading to fewer objections to police tactics.

"The danger is it softens people up to the next step," he said.

The next step is Brazil in 2016, where circumstances on the ground dictate what will almost inevitably be an even stronger implementation of security force and technology. (Privacy advocates are too pessimistic about the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, Russia, to use those games as a battleground.) An active battle between paramilitary police forces and organized crime means residents are used to compromised civil liberties, and even before the 2016 Games, Rio de Janeiro will host the World Cup in 2014. Diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks suggest that U.S. government officials have encouraged use of additional surveillance tools by the Brazilian government, as well as a partnership with U.S. security agencies.

As a result, market research firm 6Wresearch predicts the market for security cameras will nearly quadruple, to $362 million, by 2016.

By then, Pickles warns, people have another element to worry about: increased sophistication of technologies like facial recognition. Londoners, for example, would almost certainly not tolerate a permanent military presence in the city. But as police gadgets get smaller and smarter, they also become less visible.

"It's getting more discreet, even as the processing power is getting more powerful," he said. "It's becoming much more clandestine, ... which means people won't object to it as much."

Looking to Vancouver
Brazil and London might be able to learn something from Vancouver's experience after the 2010 Winter Games. Western Canada has an active civil participation culture, and even before the Games began, Canada's privacy commissioner warned about mission creep in Olympics security plans.

"The right to privacy must be upheld, even during mega-events like the Olympic Games, where the threat to security is higher than usual," Commissioner Jennifer Stoddard said in a speech delivered before the Games calling for dismantling of surveillance technology after the Games. "Will the residents of Vancouver and the lower mainland wind up living surrounded by an array of surveillance systems that they neither want nor need?"

Partly as a result, most of the 900 video cameras installed by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police were removed after the Games. About 75 were left behind for use by the Vancouver police, said Adam Molnar, who is studying the Olympics security effect as part of his Ph.D. work at the University of Victoria.

"British Columbia civil liberties associations put pressure on the Vancouver Police Department, which was in negotiations to keep the cameras up," he said. Even some of the remaining cameras were turned off, only to be used in crisis situations, he said.

On the other hand, analysis of Vancouver's post-Olympics security hangover is muddied by the fact that in the spring of 2011, there were major riots after the Vancouver Canucks lost hockey’s Stanley Cup final. City officials have successfully turned to Twitter and other social media tools that deputized people to help identify criminals during the riots. Given the embarrassment over the riots, many residents were eager to help.

"That turns out to be an alternate route to (security) cameras everywhere," Molnar said.

The most lasting legacy of the Vancouver Games, Molnar said, was not police gadgetry, but rather reorganization of the police force into small, nimble anti-riot teams that share some characteristics with paramilitary teams.

"The extent that militarist ideal supplants community-based policing, that should concern people," he said. "And any time you have a deepening of integration between civilian and military police, like you have now in London, that's disturbing."

Molnar felt confident that Vancouver's security experience offered some hope to privacy advocates in London and Rio, however.

"You can look to Vancouver as a positive example of an active civil liberty and political community that tried to engage the government around privacy and surveillance issues, and that did earn some small victories," he said. "In many ways it's forced policing agencies to respond to public debate. ... There's certainly a need for informed civilian oversight."

'Mega-events'
But Bowe, of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said she's worried that the Olympics will continue to be abused as one of a list of "mega-events" that give officials permission to tighten the security screws until tremendous power is concentrated in small government forces.

"The march toward a militarized, urban future will continue apace unless people push back," she said. 

And Lopez sees little room for hope at the moment.

"My general worry as a human being is about the setting up of apparatus of police states in all of these places," he said.

Even those who have faith in the good intentions of their current government are being short-sighted, he warned.

"The (U.S.) and some of these places are not a police state now. But the problem is if the apparatus is set up, it could be easily be Nazified and turned on people. ... If there's a history to the world, it's that certain small, elite groups of people usurp and pervert the great works of the majority of humanity, like the Olympic Games, for nefarious and selfish purposes."

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Welcome to the hangout on social media and privacy, powered by Google+, conducted on May 18. 

Our panelists are: Bob Sullivan, author of msnbc.com's Red Tape Chronicles, Jeff Fox of Consumers Union and Steve Rubel of the public relations firm Edelman. You can read a bit more about them below:

Questions were submitted at msnbc.com's Google Hangout or by tweeting using the hashtag #talkprivacy.

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• Bob Sullivan is an award-winng journalist and author of The Red Tape Chronicles on msnbc.com. He also is the author of three books, including the 2008 New York Times Best-Seller, "Gotcha Capitalism," and the 2010 New York Times Best Seller, "Stop Getting Ripped Off!"
• Steve Rubel, executive vice president for global strategy and insights at Edelman, the world’s largest independent public relations firm. He’s also a frequent social media commentator.
• Jeff Fox, technology editor at Consumers Union. He was responsible for this month’s Consumer Reports cover story on Facebook and privacy. 

A mother who says her middle-school daughter was forced to let school officials browse the 13-year-old girl’s private Facebook page is speaking out against the practice because, she says, "other parents are scared to talk about it."

Pam Broviak, who lives in the Chicago suburb of Geneva, Ill., says her daughter was traumatized when the principal of Geneva Middle School South forced the child to log in to her Facebook account, then rummaged through the girl's private information.

"What a violation of my daughter's privacy this whole episode was," Broviak said. The incident took "a huge toll on my daughter, who ended up crying through most of the rest of the day and therefore missed most of her classes. She was embarrassed and very upset."

There have been several descriptions lately of Facebook prying by schools – and one lawsuit was filed recently by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of an anonymous plaintiff against a school district that allegedly demanded a student’s social media passwords. But Broviak may be the first parent to go public with concerns about what she sees as serious violations of student privacy.

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In a conversation with msnbc.com, Broviak said she confronted school officials about the incident involving her daughter soon after it occurred last fall and was told that they routinely investigate student issues by asking kids to log into their social networking pages -- or cellphones -- in the presence of administrators. And she said her daughter and other students told her they are frequently called into the principal’s office and told that they can’t leave until they surrender their passwords or unlock their phones and allow school officials to browse their personal information.

"(Students) let them see the accounts because otherwise, they are not allowed to leave the room. And that is just wrong," she said.

Kent Mutchler, superintendent of Geneva schools, said in an interview with msnbc.com that he couldn't comment on Broviak’s daughter because privacy rules prevent him from publicly discussing an individual student’s situation. But he said Broviak's description of district policy is inaccurate.

"We would never demand someone's password. When you have someone's password, you open yourself up to other issues," Mutchler said. "But if we have a disruptive situation, a school (official) will ask to see the page, and if the student refuses, we call the parents."

But principals only request access to students' social media pages under extreme circumstances, Mutchler said.

"There are different levels of concern. If there is a drug trafficking suspicion, we'll get the police involved. If it's something like cyberbullying, we'll say, 'This has been reported to us,' and ask to see the page," he said.

Often, students volunteer before they are even asked, he said.

"We ask, 'Is there something you want to show us?' that sort of thing. And they volunteer," he said. 

Such incidents are very rare among district middle schools, he said, contradicting Broviak's assertion that the inspections are commonplace. 

"It happens a half-dozen to a dozen times per year," he said.

Broviak's public complaint comes at a time when schools, employers and lawmakers around the country are wrestling with sticky privacy issues surrounding social networks. The state Legislature in Illinois is considering legislation that would make it illegal for employers to demand access to workers’ or applicants’ private social media information. That law is silent on the issue of schools and social media snooping, but federal legislation introduced last month by Rep. Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., would extend the protections to students, too.

Submit your questions about social media and privacy, then join our Google+ Hangout Friday at 4 p.m. ET.

Broviak said she didn't think school officials should ever look at a child's personal social media page or cellphone without first contacting parents.

"It's just wrong for them to do this, but parents are afraid to talk about it, because they are worried, 'Are they going to target my kid?'" she said.

Additionally, she said, looking at a kids' social media page violates an entire family's privacy, even if school officials don’t intend to look at posts involving other family members.

"The whole family is exposed in this," she said. "Some families communicate through Facebook. What if her aunt was going through a divorce or had an illness? And now there's these anonymous people reading through this information."

When the first incident occurred in the fall, Broviak said she didn't know what to do -- and initially chose to let it drop for fear that complaining might make things worse for her daughter. But she said reports from her daughter that other kids have been treated the same way and a recent spate of news stories surrounding the issue pushed her to speak up. Three weeks ago she published a detailed accounting of events on her personal blog, and this week agreed to be interviewed by msnbc.com.

"It's really important for people to talk about this and know what's going on," she said. "And I'm really glad that the state Legislature and Congress are considering laws to deal with this."

Her daughter, meanwhile, has learned an important but sad lesson through this experience, Broviak said.

"It's taught her to use better judgment with adults," she said. "Basically, what (they) showed her was you can’t trust anyone. Her trust in and the respect of the adults at her school has been shattered to the point that she is struggling to look beyond this abuse and allow for the education process to occur."

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If you think privacy settings on your Facebook and Twitter accounts guarantee future employers or schools can't see your private posts, guess again.

Employers and colleges find the treasure-trove of personal information hiding behind password-protected accounts and privacy walls just too tempting, and some are demanding full access from job applicants and student athletes.

In Maryland, job seekers applying to the state's Department of Corrections have been asked during interviews to log into their accounts and let an interviewer watch while the potential employee clicks through wall posts, friends, photos and anything else that might be found behind the privacy wall.

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Previously, applicants were asked to surrender their user name and password, but a complaint from the ACLU stopped that practice last year. While submitting to a Facebook review is voluntary, virtually all applicants agree to it out of a desire to score well in the interview, according Maryland ACLU legislative director Melissa Coretz Goemann.

Student-athletes in colleges around the country also are finding out they can no longer maintain privacy in Facebook communications because schools are requiring them to "friend" a coach or compliance officer, giving that person access to their “friends-only” posts. Schools are also turning to social media monitoring companies with names like UDilligence and Varsity Monitor for software packages that automate the task. The programs offer a "reputation scoreboard" to coaches and send "threat level" warnings about individual athletes to compliance officers.

A recent revision in the handbook at the University of North Carolina is typical:

"Each team must identify at least one coach or administrator who is responsible for having access to and regularly monitoring the content of team members’ social networking sites and postings,” it reads. "The athletics department also reserves the right to have other staff members monitor athletes’ posts."

All this scrutiny is too much for Bradley Shear, a Washington D.C.-lawyer who says both schools and employers are violating the First Amendment with demands for access to otherwise private social media content.

"I can't believe some people think it's OK to do this,” he said. “Maybe it's OK if you live in a totalitarian regime, but we still have a Constitution to protect us. It's not a far leap from reading people's Facebook posts to reading their email. ... As a society, where are we going to draw the line?"

Aside from the free speech concerns, Shear also thinks colleges take on unnecessary liability when they aggressively monitor student posts.

"What if the University of Virginia had been monitoring accounts in the Yeardley Love case and missed signals that something was going to happen?” he said, referring to a notorious campus murder. “What about the liability the school might have?"

Shear has gotten the attention of Maryland state legislators, who have proposed two separate bills aimed at banning social media access by schools and potential employers. The ACLU is aggressively supporting the bills.

"This is an invasion of privacy. People have so much personal information on their pages now. A person can treat it almost like a diary," said Goemann, the Maryland ACLU legislative director. "And (interviewers and schools) are also invading other people's privacy. They get access to that individual’s posts and all their friends. There is a lot of private information there."

Maryland's Department of Corrections policy first came to light last year, when corrections officer Robert Collins complained to the ACLU that he was forced to surrender his Facebook user name and password during an interview. The state agency suspended the policy for 45 days, and eventually settled on the “shoulder-surfing” substitute.

"My fellow officers and I should not have to allow the government to view our personal Facebook posts  and those of our friends just to keep our jobs," Collins said to the ACLU at the time.

Agency spokesman Rick Binetti confirmed the new policy, but wouldn't comment on it or the proposed law which may ban it.

It's easy to see why an agency that hires prison guards would want to sneak a peek at potential employees’ private online lives. Goemann said that prisons are trying to avoid hiring guards with potential gang ties -- the agency told the ACLU it had reviewed 2,689 applicants via social media, and denied employment to seven because of items found on their pages.

"All seven of these individuals' social media applications contained pictures of them showing verified gang signs (signs commonly known to law enforcement which are utilized by gangs)," the Department of Corrections told the ACLU  in response to questions it asked about the program. It stressed the voluntary nature of social media inspection, noting that five of the 80 employees hired in the last three hiring cycles didn't provide access.

For student athletes, though, the access isn't voluntary. No access, no sports.

"They're saying to students if you want to play, you have to friend a coach. That's very troubling," said Shear, the D.C. lawyer.  "A good analogy for this, in the offline world, would it be acceptable for schools to require athletes to bug their off-campus apartments? Does a school have a right to know who all your friends are?"

There have been many high-profile embarrassing moments born of the toxic combination of student-athletes and Twitter. North Carolina defensive lineman Marvin Austin tweeted about expensive purchases on his account two years ago, then became subject of an NCAA investigation about improper conduct with a player agent. The incident led, in part, to the school's aforementioned aggressive social media policy.

So it’s not surprising that many schools want to keep a careful eye on what students are posting online.

But avoiding an uncomfortable moment is not a good enough reason to squash free speech, Spear says. Plenty of settled case law in the U.S. sides with students' rights to express themselves publicly, he said, including numerous cases involving student newspapers.  Public displays of protest are also protected: A landmark 1969 Supreme Court decisions known as Tinker vs. the Des Moines School District said school officials couldn't prevent students from wearing armbands protesting the Vietnam War as long as they weren't inciting violence.

Colleges have legitimate concerns about the things students post on social media accounts, but they should "deal with that issue the way they deal with everything else. They should educate," Shear said.

"Schools are in the business of educating, not spying," he added. "We don't hire private investigators to follow students wherever they go. If students say stupid things online, they should educate them ... not engage in prior restraint."

Goemann also noted that the rush to social media monitoring raises an often overlooked legal concern: It's against Facebook's Terms of Service.

"You will not share your password ... let anyone else access your account or do anything else that might jeopardize the security of your account," the site says in its policies. 

Frederic Wolens, a Facebook spokesman, wouldn't comment on the Maryland legislative proposals, but he said many of these school and employer policies appear to violate the site's terms.

"Under our terms, only the holder of the email address and password is considered the Facebook account owner. We also prohibit anyone from soliciting the login information or accessing an account belonging to someone else," he said in a statement to msnbc.com. Wolens said Facebook has yet to take a position on collegiate social media monitoring.

Social media monitoring on colleges, while spreading quickly among athletic departments, seems to be limited to athletes at the moment. There's nothing stopping schools from applying the same policies to other students, however.  And Shear says he's heard from college applicants that interviewers have requested Facebook or Twitter login information during in-person screenings.

The practice seems less common among employers, but scattered incidents are gaining attention from state lawmakers. The blog Tecca.com last year showed what it said was an image of an application for a clerical job with a North Carolina police department that included the following question:

"Do you have any web page accounts such as Facebook, Myspace, etc.?  If so, list your username and password." 

And the state of Illinois has followed Maryland's lead and is considering similar legislation to ban social media password demands by employers. 

But Shear says a patchwork of state laws isn't good enough when the stakes are this high.

"We need a federal law dealing with this," he said. "After 9/11, we have a culture where some people think it's OK for the government to be this involved in our lives, that it's OK to turn everything over to the government. But it's not. We still have privacy rights in this country, and we still have a Constitution."

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Facebook is apparently getting a lot more unfriendly.

Users are getting a lot more selective, deleting comments, photo tags and even friends at a record rate, according to a new study released Friday by the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

Pew is calling this phenomenon "the pruning" of social networks, and the study includes findings like this: 63 percent of users have unfriended people from their friends users. Another 44 percent have deleted comments made by others from their profile page, and 37 percent have removed tags from photos.

"Social network users are becoming more active in pruning and managing their accounts," says the report, written by Mary Madden, senior research specialist at Pew.

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Users are also taking an active role in keeping their private information private, with 58 percent of users saying they use high-level privacy settings so only friends can view their pages. Women are far more restrictive, with 67 percent using the tightest privacy settings, compared to 48 percent of men. They lock down their accounts despite the fact that half of all users say they have "some difficulty" using the privacy controls.

The research seems to suggest that U.S. adults, who have so far shown little appetite for actively managing their personal privacy, are starting to get the hang of it.

"Social science researchers have long noted a major disconnect in attitudes and practices around information privacy online. When asked, people say that privacy is important to them; when observed, people’s actions seem to suggest otherwise," the report noted. The shift to more privacy on Facebook seems to belie this long-standing trend.

Perhaps regret has something to do with that.  The report found that 11 percent of Facebook users say they've posted something that they regret on a social network. Men are twice as likely to say so (15 percent to 8 percent). Users 50 and older, at 5 percent, are much less likely than young adults under 29 (15 percent), to express such regret. 

One area where there was a surprising lack of age gap: Overall privacy settings. While 23 percent of users 65 and over choose fully public settings, 22 percent of users 18-29make the same choice.

"The choices that adults make regarding their privacy settings are also virtually identical to those of teenage social media users," the report said.  "Private settings are the norm, regardless of age."

Young adults are more likely to "unfriend," however at 71 percent, compared to just 41 percent for the oldest users.

The Pew report is based on a survey of 2,277 U.S. adults conducted in May, and has a margin of error of +/- 3 percent.  In nearly all "pruning" related categories, and within nearly all age groups, use of privacy-related tools gained ground since the last time Pew conducted the study in 2009. Back then, only 30 percent of all users had untagged a photo, compared to 37 percent in 2011; and 56 percent had unfriended someone, compared to 63 percent in 2011. 

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You already have an "insurance score." You have an "Employment Credit Score."  There's even a "MedFICO," which attempts to predict whether you’ll actually pay your doctor’s bills.  Now that a "Facebook score" has been invented,  I expect a "Grocery Habits score" and a "Music Taste" score to arrive any time now.

These scores probably hurt you more than help you, and in ways that are kept secret from you.  To borrow a phrase from today's big pop-culture story, American businesses are suffering from "Score-sanity."  And you are suffering the consequences.

In case you missed it, researchers at three U.S. colleges say they've figured out a way to predict future job success by scoring applicants' Facebook profile pages. This wasn't a mere exercise in finding embarrassing college photos. The profs created five categories that map to character traits which often lead to success at work: Conscientiousness, emotional stability, agreeableness, extraversion and openness. Then, people were boiled down to a "personality score," which may as well be called a Facebook score.  Surprise! The score did a decent job of mapping to employee reviews six months later.

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Donald Kluemper, a management professor at Northern Illinois University, said he doesn’t want human resources departments to begin using Facebook scores, which have so far been tested on only 56 people. But as my colleague Eve Tahmincioglu said so well, "It may be hard to put the Facebook personality cat back in the hiring bag."

We already know that U.S.-based hiring managers routinely browse Facebook while screening applicants (something that is illegal in Germany). A scoring system that automates that process, and promises to take human error out of it, will be just too tempting. 

 

Today is not the day to debate the wisdom of the “Moneyball-ization” of America, the wisdom of our newfound romance with everything and anything that fits into a database.  My main concern with Facebook scores -- as it is with insurance scores -- is the lack of transparency. Odds are that you pay more for your auto insurance than you should if your credit score is low. How much more? No one knows, because the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that auto insurance companies don't have to tell you. Insurers have decided that credit scores are a good predictor of future insurance claims, and punish drivers based on that.  But they don't have to tell them what the low-score penalty is.

Soon, some workers will face mysterious troubles getting past the first round of interviews, and have no idea why.  The cause could be an embarrassing photo in a social media profile. But based on this new research, it could that they don't discuss classic literature often enough in their timeline, or they don't have 700 friends. 

Study after study shows that while Americans claim to care about privacy, they don't.  Fewer than 10 percent change their behavior in an attempt to preserve their privacy; another  third essentially believe: "I have nothing to hide so why should I care?" 

Your Facebook score is the answer.

Professor Daniel Solove of George Washington University, who studies the intersection of privacy and policy, has found that most young Facebook users aren't worried about the things they post online because they have a naive faith that it won't hurt them later in life.  They believe no hiring manager would hold some random Tweet against them. They are wrong.  An HR department facing a stack of 100 resumes for one job would love a numerical tool that could automatically whittle the pile to five or six.  HR departments already do some of this whittling based on credit reports.

When young people tell me they have nothing to hide, I often ask them about their music  tastes. Most use iTunes, and increasingly use subscription services like Spotify. These firms know everything about their music tastes.  It is a very small leap to imagine these companies selling this data to employment background firms, which might then find a correlation between the bands that subjects listen to and their likelihood they'll habitually be late to work. Suddenly, a private allegiance to Megadeth could become a debilitating problem for an innocent worker who would have no idea why the rejection letters won't stop.

"No fair," folks often reply.

"But quite legal," I respond. Due to a quirk in the law (thanks to a very embarrassing Supreme Court nomination proceeding for Robert Bork), video rental records cannot be shared and sold in this manner. Thank God, otherwise Netflix would have done this long ago.  But music, social media posts, blog comments -- all these things are fair game to be sold, shared, jammed into a spreadsheet, and used to raise your health insurance rates or block you from a promotion.  Bought a lot of ice cream in 2008-2013? Watch those health insurance rates rise in 2020.

Maybe that's a good thing. To be fair, some people with higher credit scores do pay less for auto insurance because of this system. We can bicker about the wisdom of data mining and correlations. But we can't bicker about this: None of this is transparent.  No laws are in place to make sure this is fair.  No one has debated the wisdom of allowing social network activity to influence employment prospects (while other societies have decided against it). And most important, no one has made the rules clear for consumers.

There is a model for this. In the credit world, when consumers are denied a loan because of a low credit score, they are entitled to receive a "notice of adverse action." They are also entitled to see a copy of the credit report used in the decision.  Now is the time to think about regulations to ensure such consumer rights in this even-expanding world of "Score-sanity."  If someone's job prospects are hurt by the number of Tweets they publish on the New York Yankees, they should know. They should be entitled to a copy of their "Facebook Score" and the report that goes with it. 

I know companies which create such reports view them as proprietary, as the secret sauce they sell, and they fear that if consumers learn how the system works, they'll try to game the system. Tough. We’re talking about lives and livelihoods here. 

Correction: An initial version of this report said HR departments use credit scores when considering applicants. They use credit reports without a credit score.

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The "Universal Forensic Extraction Device" sounds like the perfect cell phone snooping gadget.

Its maker, Israel-based Cellbrite, says it can copy all the content in a cell phone --  including contacts, text messages, call history, and pictures --  within a few minutes.  Even deleted texts and other data can be restored by UFED 2.0, the latest version of the product, it says.

And it really is a universal tool. The firm says UFED works with 3,000 cell phone models, representing 95 percent of the handset market.  Coming soon, the firm says on its website: "Additional major breakthroughs, including comprehensive iPhone physical solution; Android physical support – allowing bypassing of user lock code, (Windows Phone) support, and much more."  For good measure, UFEC can extract information from GPS units in most cars.

The gadget isn't a stalker's dream; it's an evidence-gathering tool for law enforcement. Cellbrite claims it’s already in use in 60 countries.

That apparently includes the U.S. The American Civil Liberties Union in Michigan says it has learned that state police there have purchased some of the gadgets.  What is it doing with them? So far, Michigan authorities aren't telling. A public records request for information by the ACLU was met with a prohibitive $500,000 bill to cover the supposed cost of making the documents available.

"They did produce documents which confirmed that they have them," said Mark Fancher, a staff attorney at the ACLU office. "We have no idea what they are doing with them."

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 Technology and the Fourth Amendment have had a rocky relationship. When The Founding Fathers created protections against unlimited search and seizure, they never imagined the kind of tools that would be available to 21st century police officers.

Cell phone data is an indispensible tool in both investigations and prosecutions. A drug dealer's contact list is an obvious treasure trove. Location information stored in the phone can prove (or disprove) an alibi.  Texts are at least as valuable as emails. Increasingly, smartphone s are used as mini-laptops, placing even more ready-made evidence in one small package -- as long as law enforcement can get to it before it's destroyed. 

Because handsets are nearly always with suspects, it's easy for a would-be criminal to delete information during a traffic stop.  Remote wiping programs exist that mean critical evidence could be destroyed even after a police officer takes possession of a suspect's phone. That means law enforcement official s have great interest in slurping up all the secrets that a handset might contain as quickly as possible.  Enter Cellbrite.

But how fast is too fast?  Fancher and the ACLU argue that most cell phone searches  are an invasion of privacy that requires law enforcement officials to get a court order before rummaging through a suspect's handset data.  While UFED could be used after an order is obtained, its obvious focus is on time-critical searches -- those that would occur, for example, right after a "routine traffic stop."

"The Fourth Amendment protects citizens and allows them to have some confidence that law enforcement can't go in on a whim and take a look at most private details of our lives," said Fancher.  "Our concern is that the device can empty a cell phone within 90 seconds, offering law enforcement a powerful ability to intrude on and infringe on people’s rights."

Do cops need a court order to search the contents of a cell phone?  The law is still evolving, but at least one recent major decision chose police over privacy. The California Supreme Court recently issued a ruling that allowed police to use text message evidence they'd obtained without a court order. The ruling seemed to open the door to widespread use of warrantless cell phone searches in California.

But Fancher cautioned against generalizing too much from a single search-and-seizure case.

"They often involve a lot of nuance," he said.  "You really have to go case-by-case when searches are involved."

There are clear-cut cases where court orders wouldn't be required to search cell phones -- if police are in hot pursuit of a crime or have probable cause to believe that evidence is in immediate danger of being destroyed.  Such situations are exceptions, however, Fancher said. He's concerned that the easy-to-use gadgets in the hands of field officers would make cell phone searches the rule, rather the exception.

Cellbrite didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. On its website, the firm says it was founded in 1999 and was purchased by a Japanese company in 2007. Its data-slurping technology grew out of products it sells that are used to transfer contact information from old phones to a new phones at cell phone retailers.

The Michigan State Police did not respond to a request for comment.

Technology continues to throw major legal headaches at law enforcement officials and Fourth Amendment rights advocates. 

The U.S. Supreme Court is currently mulling a related issue involving the use of persistent GPS monitoring of suspects without a warrant.  In that case, the FBI placed a GPS monitoring device on a suspect's car without a warrant and then tracked his driving for driving weeks. The Department of Justice says the technique is akin to surveillance on public roads, but a federal appeals court ruled that such aggregation of movements over time constituted a Fourth Amendment violation. Because the ruling conflicts with other appeals court rulings in similar cases, the Department of Justice recently asked the Supreme Court to take the case and settle the matter.

Fancher said his quest for information about the cell phone data copying device from the Michigan State Police began in 2008. After receiving a $500,000 bill for records requests, along with a demand for a $250,000 down payment, the ACLU tried to narrow its requests to reach a more reasonable cost. It filed 70 FOIA requests last November, for example. But the method also proved fruitless.

"We have tried everything we know of to work with FOIA personnel to get the documents we seek and had no success, so we've taken the opportunity to go to the top and try to shake things loose," Fancher said.  On April 13, the ACLU sent a letter to State Police Director Kriste Etue, and made that letter public to the media.

"The ACLU should not have to go on a fishing expedition in order to discover whether the state police are violating the privacy of individuals through the use of new, sophisticated technology," the letter read.

The ACLUs real concern with the gadgets is that they will prove too tempting for state troopers, and abuses will occur.

"We're not accusing the state police of using them improperly.  It's not illegal or improper for them to have them," he said. "Our concern is, what are they doing to insure they are complying with constitutional requirements? ... We'd be interested, for example, in what kinds of supervision there is over their use."

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