Law Blog 2.0

Social networking sites, efficient search tools (bing, dogpile, google, yahoo), blogs, cookies, mailing lists, message boards, active x controls/ embedded java script on websites and other databases make it easy to identify that new business prospect or easily cross-reference materials from multiple sources to yield unique insights into a matter of interest. However, these online repositories of data are making it much more difficult to maintain the anonymity of those whose confidential information has been de-identified. De-identified data has many useful purposes; the data can be used in its aggregate for tracking disease, flu outbreaks, tax purposes, etc. There is a darker use of these many data sources, where those in our society that are ethically challenged use these data sources for socially unproductive purposes. [...]