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Search Results: privacy breach (6)

N.J. Apologizes For Privacy Breach In Medical Marijuana Email

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By on Dispensaries, Medical, News

State of New Jersey Department of Health

New Jersey’s Health Department has apologized after an email from the department included the visible email addresses of all recipients — revealing the email addresses of medical marijuana patient in the state. The department claimed it was taking steps to prevent the error from happening again.

Toke of the Town originally broke the story on Tuesday after registered New Jersey medical marijuana patient Susan Sturner let us know about the email which violated the privacy of patients.

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NJ Medical Marijuana Program Violated Patient Privacy

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By on Dispensaries, Medical, News

Coalition for Medical Marijuana – New Jersey
Susan Sturner: “As a patient who is still waiting for my appointment to get my medicine, I am outraged”

New Jersey’s struggling medical marijuana program — slow-tracked by Republican Governor Chris Christie after being signed by his predecessor Democratic Governor Jon Corzine on his last day in office in 2010 — may have violated the confidentiality of patients with an email sent on Tuesday.

Patients have to be quite ill to qualify for the New Jersey’s Medical Marijuana Program (MMP); it is one of the strictest in the nation. Many of these patients have been desperately waiting for almost three years to get their legal marijuana, as their conditions deteriorate.

According to Susan Sturner, a registered N.J. MMP patient, “Today the state’s MMP sent out a nasty email to the sickest people in the state, those of us with the most debilitating diseases according to them.
“Not only is the email nasty and inappropriate,” Sturner told Toke of the Town, “it has all the email address of all the people signed up for the NJ MMP in the ‘to’ field, so everyone who received the email can see all of the other patients’ addresses.”
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Canada Supreme Court: No Privacy For Marijuana Grow-Ops

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By on Global, Growing, News

Graphic: Democracy Cell Project

​Electricity usage records are now effectively the property of the police in Canada — and they don’t even need a warrant. Law enforcement did not overstep their powers when they asked a Calgary electricity company to spy on one of its customers by installing a special tracking device to find if he was growing marijuana, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled on Wednesday.

In a 7-2 decision, Canada’s badly split highest court argued over privacy rights, but overturned an Alberta Court of Appeal judgment that ordered a new trial for Daniel Gomboc, reports The Canadian Press.
“As is true of all constitutional rights, the Charter’s protection is not absolute,” Madam Justice Marie Deschamps wrote for the majority, as she sold out the privacy rights of Canadians. “The Constitution does not cloak the home in an impenetrable veil of privacy. To expect such protection would not only be impractical; it would also be unreasonable.”
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Facebook Scrambling to Save Face Amid Policy Changes and Bad Press

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By on Culture, Follow that story, Media

Keep your friends close. Keep your enemies closer. Keep your Friends List private.


You may remember a couple of weeks ago we reported here on a story about DEA agents in New York stealing a suspect’s online identity and creating a fake Facebook profile in her likeness in an attempt to lure her friends into guilt-ridden admissions of their own.
The suspect, Sondra Arquiett, sued the Drug Enforcement Agency and the federal government for $250,000 and was due to begin court proceedings on the matter this week, but the suit is now in mediation as the feds try to buy their way out of the embarrassing situation. The revelation that law enforcement was using the popular social media networking site to conduct undercover investigations was just another on a growing list of incidences that have left those still logging on wondering just how real, and how safe, Facebook actually is.

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Homeland Security Searches Your Facebook For Marijuana

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By on Culture, News

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)
I don’t feel like a terrorist just because I smoke weed. Do you?

​You knew it would come to this, right? Lest you think those hard-working goons at the Department of Homeland Security are slacking in their jobs — you know, spying on your everyday activities — it has been revealed that the domestic surveillance agency has been scouring your online postings for, among other things, the word “marijuana.”

Homeland Security personnel regularly monitor updates on social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, and Google+, to uncover “Items Of Interest” (IOI), according to an internal DHS memo released by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), reports Animal New York.
That baseline list of terms for which the DHS searches — or at least a DHS subcontractor hired to monitor social networks — reveals which specific words generate realtime IOI reports.
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Posting About Marijuana On Facebook Can Get You Fired

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By on Culture, News

Graphic: MarijuanaSEO.com

​Your cannabis activism on Facebook may mean a lot to you. Or maybe you just like posting party pictures. But if you’re in the corporate world, either one can get you fired.

In a growing nationwide trend, companies are starting to pay more attention to their employees’ Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and MySpace postings — and that’s not always a good thing, especially when staffers are involved in the marijuana subculture.

This has resulted in employers increasingly punishing employees who are seen as damaging the “digital reputation” of the firms for which they work, reports Tim Devaney at The Detroit News.
This year, more than one in five companies with 1,000 or more employees — 21 percent — have disciplined employees for “violating social networking policies,” compared to 13 percent in 2008, according to a survey by Proofpoint Inc., an email security company in Sunnyvale, Calif.
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