[Air-l] ethics - aol data

[burkx006 at umn.edu]

On Aug 29 2006, Jeremy Hunsinger wrote:

>a few minor points that some will disagree with....

>c. most people in the developed world have already in some form or  
>another by license or contract signed away whatever privacy that they  
>had in their use of the internet.

Well, although the general point is a worthwhile, I have to quibble with 
this one just a bit. Private agreements don't trump public statutes. There 
are some things that we don't let you sign away -- like kidneys, the right 
to vote, babies, and certain privacy protections, depending on how 
paternalistic your local jurisdiction may be -- the Europeans are highly 
paternalistic, the Americans less so, the Canadians (as always) somewhere 
in between. But to the extent that a license attempts to override public 
policy in any of those places, it's void.

More specifically, one of the U.S. claims against AOL is that the data 
release is an ECPA violation. ECPA isn't the height of privacy protection, 
but it is something. DLB


-- 
Dan L. Burk
Oppenheimer, Wolff & Donnelly Professor
University of Minnesota Law School
229 19th Avenue South
Minneapolis, MN  55455
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