Privacy Act

1. Privacy is a concept that is rapidly evolving in relation to the most public of mediums, the Internet, which became even more super-charged with social networking websites. In a recent California election, one ballot measure, Proposition 8, asked voters a question on marriage. Donors to the Prop 8 campaign found that their names, addresses, and amount of contribution were masked up with Google Maps and thus rendered into a format showing the world a map image of donors’ names, street addresses, and dollar contributions. All this data is public record information already, but still quite inconvenient to access. What are the side effects of this action?

2. For apps to be featured on the iPhone, developers must build it with Apple’s software development kit and then apply for approval. Apple rejected the Google Voice iPhone App, and further stated that it would not accept any applications that incorporated Google Voice functionality. Apple reasoned that this app duplicates the phone’s core features. It also rejected Google’s location-based app Google Latitude. If you were developing a collaborative platform, do you think the best model is this collaborative model, or is the open innovation model better – if your main goal is to maximize innovation? What if your main goal is to make money?

3. Plaintiffs filed a class action lawsuit against investment banks alleging that they inflated prices on more than 300 IPOs, causing IPO investors to overpay for stock, and unlawfully benefited these banks through overcompensation of banking commissions and profits made through quick sales of this stock in their own accounts before prices settled into a more realistic valuation. How would you combat such abuses going forward?

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