The first federal Internet privacy law (the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act) provides safeguards for children by regulating collection of their personal information. Unfortunately, teens are not protected. Legislation is pending to protect children from online marketers such as ZapMe! Interactive technologies require constant vigilance.…

Discusses Oklahoma case ("Owasso Independent School District No. 1-001 v. Falvo") wherein the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in February 2002 that peer grading did not violate the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). (PKP)

Electronic commerce has intensified conflict between businesses' need to collect data and customers' desire to protect privacy. Web-based privacy tools and legislation could add to the costs of e-commerce and reduce profitability. Business models not based on profiling customers may be needed. (SK)

Radio frequency identification, or RFID, is a generic term for technologies that use radio waves to automatically identify people or objects. There are several methods of identification, but the most common is to store a serial number that identifies a person or object, and perhaps other information, on a microchip that is attached to an antenna…

Accompanying the explosive growth of the Internet have been concerns about protecting children from viewing pornographic and other harmful images through cyberspace. In the past few years, Congress has passed several acts to censor Internet sites available to children, but only the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) has received Supreme…

School art therapists face numerous ethical dilemmas, from referrals to therapy, through privacy, safety and predictability in the art therapy room, to the need to balance cooperation with the educational staff and its expectations of shared information with loyalty to the patient. Breach of confidentiality also has legal implications. The…

This article describes a forensic DNA science laboratory exercise for advanced high school and introductory college level biology courses. Students use a commercial genotyping kit and genetic analyzer or gene sequencer to analyze DNA recovered from a fictitious crime scene. DNA profiling and STR genotyping are outlined. DNA extraction, PCR, and…

By providing the public with online computing facilities, librarians make available a world of information resources beyond their traditional print materials. Internet-connected computers in libraries greatly enhance the opportunity for patrons to enjoy the benefits of the digital age. Unfortunately, as hackers become more sophisticated and…

Videos of teachers that students taped in secrecy are all over online sites like YouTube and MySpace. Angry teachers, enthusiastic teachers, teachers clowning around, singing, and even dancing are captured, usually with camera phones, for the whole world to see. Some students go so far as to create elaborately edited videos, shot over several…

The concept of "publishing" has changed again, just in the last few years, due to YouTube, Blogger, Second Life, Flickr, and other new social networking tools (John Marshall Law School, 2005). Whether they are making it possible for everyone to view a video on YouTube on how to install a hard drive on a Mac, add a collaborative student writing…

In this article, the author recounts her experience in 2005 as a library director at the Mount Laurel Library in New Jersey. She thought her people at the library were in fairly good shape in terms of the professional staff's understanding of the confidentiality rules governing their customer information. However, she was wrong. This was driven…

Teenagers will freely give up personal information to join social networks on the Internet. However, a 2007 study by the Pew Internet and American Life project found that most of the 55 percent of teens who place their personal profiles online take steps to protect themselves from the most obvious areas of risk. Parents, teachers, and librarians…

Submitted to Congress by Senator William V. Roth, Jr., of the Committee on Governmental Affairs, this document reports favorably on Senate Bill 786 (the Information Age Commission Act of 1986), legislation designed to establish a commission to study the impact of computer and communications systems on American society. The report provides: (1) a…

Little is known about the implications of individual differences in privacy preferences. To explore the relationship between privacy preferences and the style and quality of social interaction in a first encounter, 77 of 320 college students completing the Privacy Preference Scale were grouped according to their low (20 male, 20 female) or high…

The findings from a study of 42 administrators in a large metropolitan school district supported the hypothesis that the use of privacy regulation mechanisms is deliberate and dynamic. The researchers considered the age and sex of the administrators, the length of time they'd held their current jobs, their tendencies toward Type A or Type B…