Results tagged “privacy”

Among the various laws signed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger yesterday was one strengthening an already existing law aimed at paparazzi.

I can't tell you where or how I first learned of Damon Packard, but his experimental-nostalgic-acid-horror-collage Reflections of Evil melted my brain forever. Packard excels at melding "borrowed" footage from '70s TV, science fiction & God knows what else with his own paranoid fantasies for pure cinematic psychosis.

The California Department of Public Health today announced a quarter-million dollar fine given to Kaiser Permanente Bellflower Hospital after "the hospital compromised the privacy of a patient when 21 employees and two physicians improperly accessed records." That patient was "Octomom" Nadya Suleman This is the first time a penalty has been assessed under new patient privacy laws went into effect last year when it was signed by Governor Schwarzenegger. "Medical privacy is a fundamental right and a critical component of quality medical care in California,” said Dr. Mark Horton, director of CDPH, in a news release. “We are very concerned with violations of patient confidentiality and their potential harm to the residents of California.”

The latest round is the Tolkienian shitstorm that has kicked up over Eightmaps.com, an invasive little enterprise that reveals, city by city and neighborhood by neighborhood, just who put their money where their gay-rights-hating mouths were and gave said money to the yes on Prop 8 Campaign. What Eightmaps does is combine publicly available donor disclosure information (which you can find here), with the subtle brilliance of Google Maps, to create an easy to use map pinpointing the location of practically everyone who donated in support of Proposition 8. Thanks to the requirements of said Donor disclosure, a surprising amount of information is provided - Full name, job title, employer and the amount of donation are all displayed in glorious technicolor. While it paints an interesting portrait of conservative California (that, among other things, indicates large number of retirees among the Prop 8ers¹), it also sparked considerable debate about civic responsibility and the right to privacy.

For the past few months we've noticed our friends randomly appearing in sidebar ads on Facebook and thought, "ZOMG Zuckerberg, are we all being used so you can pick up all of our friends for your third-party app-monkeys?

Unconfirmed reports of a mountain lion on the loose in Eagle Rock have authorities on the move, searching house to house on the 5000 block of College View Ave.

The first question should be, "who the hell still uses AOL?" With DSL being advertised for $20 or less for new users, and cable providers doing more to use that fat pipe, LAist finds very little sympathy for modern-day web surfers who pay the Virginia company $28 a month for the wonders of dial-up. And we have even less sympathy for those whose social security numbers ended up on an AOL-generated web site recently...