In this age of technology, forms of online expression such as MySpace and Facebook have become increasingly popular amidst our generation.

With these new forms of expression, new issues about privacy are being raised; particularly issues over employment. The question is, should employers be able to hire or fire based, at least in part, on the information posted on an employee or potential employee’s profile? Well, let’s examine the issue, shall we?

A person’s profile is a place for self-expression in the virtual world. It’s a place to project a tiny piece of personality using any type of media you’d prefer. Photos, videos, graphics, songs, quotes, and Favorites lists are all there to say, “This right here is me. This is what I like and what I do. This is who I am, and I want you all to see it!” It’s an environment that puts you in complete control of how others view you. You can be anyone you want to be, just like mommy always told you.

A Camden County man was arrested when he came here to meet a person who he thought was a 14-year-old boy for a sexual encounter, Atlantic County Prosecutor Jeffrey S. Blitz said Wednesday. The “child” was an undercover investigator.

Anthony Mastrando, 48, a postal carrier from Covington Drive in the Sicklerville section of Winslow Township, was charged with attempting to lure a minor to sexually assault the child and attempted sexual assault, Blitz said.

Mastrando, who is involved with youth groups at Covenant House and his church in Sicklerville, is being held in the Atlantic County jail on $100,000 cash bond, no 10 percent, Blitz said. Superior Court Judge Bernard DeLury made a condition of bail that Mastrando have no contact with children under the age of 18.

20th Century Fox served YouTube with a subpoena Wednesday

20th Century Fox served YouTube with a subpoena Wednesday demanding the Google-owned viral video site disclose the identity of a user who uploaded copies of entire recent episodes of primetime series “24″ and “The Simpsons.”

The subpoena, which first came to light on the blog Google Watch was granted by a judge in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California after being filed by the News Corp.-owned studio on Jan. 18. It is not yet known whether YouTube has complied with the request.

In addition, a second, lesser-known video site, LiveDigital, was also served with a similar subpoena.

A Fox spokesman confirmed the subpoena was filed to both YouTube and LiveDigital and served but declined further comment. A spokesman for YouTube declined comment.

The “24″ episodes in question actually appeared on YouTube prior to their primetime Jan. 14 premiere on the Fox broadcast network, which spread four hourlong episodes of the hit drama over two consecutive nights. Fox became aware the episodes were on YouTube on Jan. 8, according to the subpoena.

Everybody likes having a good laugh at a silly mistake. But sometimes little flubs can be costly, especially when they’re common practice.

Because of its casual nature and ease of use, e-mail has come to play a major role in business relations and enterprise development. It’s also an inadvertent medium for plenty of extra-office faux-pas between clients. That’s why the e-mail governance software specialists at MessageGate did some R&D to hone their take on the top 10 e-mail blunders of the year.

Here’s the Top 10, and a bit of illustrative commentary. Sound familiar? Then maybe it’s time to start tightening the reins on e-mail relations between your four walls:

10. Politics As Usual
MessageGate cites the woeful tale of a Small Business Administration lawyer who gets canned after sending and mailing over 100 e-mails favouring California’s Green Party through his government computer.
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The new world of online dating brings new risks to the world of romance. Dating background checks can give daters the tools they need to make informed decisions in matters of the heart.

Dating has always been risky. Trusting someone new carries risks, especially considering that dating requires some trust and often takes daters to out-of-the-way places such as cozy restaurants, darkened movie theatres, and so on. The new interest in Internet dating has only increased risks, according to some experts. Internet research firm Nielsen/NetRatings reported that in January 2005 alone, more than 26 million people visited dating sites.

Internet dating is very convenient and offers people anonymity and a feeling of comfort. Unfortunately, it is very easy to misrepresent one’s identity online. Users of online dating services can use false names and false identities, and can also misrepresent information to give potential dates a very skewed picture of themselves. Online dates can literally be anyone — anyone from a nice person to a criminal with a very violent past.
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As they chatted online, the men might have imagined what the 15-year-old looked like.

They might have pictured a pretty blond girl, maybe a brunette.

Ed Sexton’s smooth bald head and the bristling whiskers of his mustache almost certainly didn’t come to mind.

But on the Internet, you can be whoever you say you are, and Sexton’s chat profile says he’s a 15-year-old girl in Lincoln.

The last part’s right.

Sexton is a police investigator in Lincoln who this summer busted three men he says tried to meet him for sex when he posed online as an underage girl.

For years now, attorneys, business people, and courts alike have struggled with the electronic data revolution.

As a result of fundamental changes in the way companies do business, such as the generation of millions of pages of e-mail on a daily basis, as well as the migration of standard business record-keeping to “paperless environments,” companies have tried to reconcile traditional notions of record retention and production obligations with the task of retaining and locating all of the ephem

5 Steps for E-Mail Retention

The first five steps you should take to enact an e-mail archiving and retention plan.

The wrong time to enact an e-mail archiving and retention plan is after your company gets audited or sued. The best way to protect your company, of course, is by developing a plan for managing and legally deleting your data before something happens. For companies just starting to look at their e-mail data retention policies, here are five steps to follow:

1. Catalog your company’s data and create a list of which backup tapes are at which storage site, says Todd Stefan, principal at Setec Investigations, a computer forensics firm in Los Angeles. Knowing where to find archives will save time when discovery deadlines loom, and you’ll be able to tell a judge truthfully that you produced all the relevant data you could.

Without knowledge of IT for e-discovery discussions, lawyers could run afoul of new Federal Rules amendments

Lawyers accustomed to what has been described by at least one federal district judge as “drive-by” meet and confers under the federal rules should get ready to park and prepare for an extended conversation. Whether one is a data producer (traditionally defendants) or a data requester (traditionally plaintiffs), the amendments to Rule 26(f) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure are going to profoundly affect parties’ discussions in “meet and confer” discussions concerning discovery.

For Luddite lawyers, these rule changes will require that they venture into a world that they dislike and perhaps on some level fear. But just as lawyers have survived past changes in the rules, they will survive these, too, and their clients and practices may well be better for it.

Steven Rombom never got a chance to share the results of an hours-long experiment in getting someone’s background at a hackers convention in New York City last week.

Before he could sit down to lead a Saturday afternoon panel discussion entitled “Privacy is Dead . . . Get Over It,” federal agents moved in to arrest him for his methods of digging up information on people.

• Group for Private Investigators
• Group for Process Servers