Friday’s roundup has lots of stories about privacy in Israel. But before diving into that, it might be a good time to read The-Awesomest-7-Year-Postdoc or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Tenure-track-faculty-life. A Scientific American article, providing a woman’s survival guide in the academic jungle.

  • Three employees of the Sderot municipality are suing the city council against the new biometric time clock. The Association for Civil Rights in Israel is joining the lawsuit as friends of the court. (Hebrew)
  • Tamar Almog’s story about the sorry state of privacy in Israel. A Channel 1 News Story (Hebrew), based mainly on an interview with the previous director of RAMOT, the Israeli data protection agency in the ministry of law.
  • An interesting investigation in Calcalist (Hebrew) about the government database of private companies database in Israel, and what happens to it when it reaches private data gathering companies. Apparently, the ability of these companies to provide reverse lookups, providing the list of all companies owned by a person, is the reason for a lawsuit on the basis of privacy harm.
  • Who is scared of the biometric database? A rare opinion supporting the Israeli biometric database was recently published in Ynet (Hebrew). In my opinion, the article does not provide any ground-breaking reasoning in support of the database. However, the last statement “privacy is already dead” is particularly alarming. Privacy is not dead because information systems killed it. Its threatened because governments, companies and individuals are using information systems to transgress on people’s privacy.

Eran.