Privacy Law Commons^™

When Mobile Phones Are Rfid-Equipped - Finding E.U.-U.S. Solutions To Protect Consumer Privacy And Facilitate Mobile Commerce, Nancy J. King

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

New mobile phones have been designed to include delivery of mobile advertising and other useful location-based services, but have they also been designed to protect consumers' privacy? One of the key enabling technologies for these new types of phones and new mobile services is Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), a wireless communication technology that enables the unique identification of tagged objects. In the case of RFID-enabled mobile phones, the personal nature of the devices makes it very likely that, by locating a phone, businesses will also be able to locate its owner. Consumers are currently testing new RFID-enabled phones around the …

The Right Of Privacy, Louis Nizer

Michigan Law Review

It is only during the last half-century that the law has recognized the "right to be let alone"-the right under certain circumstances to protect one's name and physiognomy from becoming public property.

No mention of such a right will be found in the works of the great political philosophers and tract-writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries-Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Spencer, Paine. In discoursing on "natural rights," "the state of nature," "social contract," and "the inalienable rights of man," they were concerned only with the power of the state to abridge the liberties of the people. Society had not yet …