This archive report was first published on 3 July 2019.
On July 3, 2019, we revisited a 1985 Supreme Court ruling on student privacy, a great historical primer that shows how little our biggest debates change over the years.
The ruling in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District held that students in school and out of school are 'persons' under the Constitution and are possessed of fundamental rights which the state must respect.
However, the law when it comes to the definition of unreasonable search and seizure is anything but straightforward. As Gerald Lefcourt, a New York lawyer who handles many search-and-seizure cases, noted, 'Reasonable suspicion' in the courts is no more than a hunch, and I don’t think this is an appropriate standard when student rights are involved.
Today, we're still grappling with these issues in the context of online tracking and targeted advertising. Researchers at Mozilla have designed an experiment called 'Hey, Advertisers, Track This!' to scramble the brains of ad trackers and make our browsing behavior look like one of four fake user profiles.
By choosing a profile and launching 100 tabs in our browser, we can make our browsing behavior look like that of a Hypebeast, Influencer, Doomsday, or Filthy Rich. The hope is to 'throw off brands who want to advertise to a very specific type of person.'
