Property Outlaws

How Squatters, Pirates and Protesters Improve the Law of Ownership

By Sonia Katyal & Eduardo M. Peñalver

[Available Here]

Fifty years ago, on Monday, February 1, 1960, Ezell Blair, Jr., Franklin McCain, Joe McNeil, and David Richmond, all freshmen at the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical University, walked into the cafeteria at the Woolworth's Store in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina. They sat down at the counter and quietly waited for service. They received none. Blair, McCain, McNeil, and Richmond were black, and Woolworth's, although not required to do so by law, followed the local "custom" of refusing to allow its black patrons to eat at its lunch counter. Though they received no service, the four men sat quietly and without incident. When the store closed at 5:30, they left. The next morning, the four young men returned, along with sixteen other students from North Carolina A&T. By Thursday morning, the ranks of the sit-in participants had swelled to over sixty. Within a month, similar sit-in protests were occurring at department stores throughout the South. The fight for civil rights would never be the same.

What had been, as one contemporary put it, a civil rights movement dominated by lawyers working quietly in courtrooms had become a mass phenomenon. The student-led sit-ins thrust the civil rights question to the forefront of the 1960 presidential elections, and there is a direct line between the students' activism and the passage of Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That landmark law, which prohibits racial discrimination in most privately-owned businesses, radically transformed rights of private ownership in the United States and has become one of our most successful civil rights statutes.

It's easy, in hindsight, to downplay the controversy that surrounded the students' tactics, but, at the time, the Greensboro protesters were maligned from all sides as threatening sacred rights of private property and the rule of law in pursuit of what many commentators considered to be a trivial interest in access to lunch counter service. Such criticism did not come just from conservatives and segregationists. According to one account, when Thurgood Marshall heard about the sit-ins, he proclaimed that "he was not going to represent a bunch of crazy colored students who violated the sacred property rights of white folks by going into their stores or lunch counters and refusing to leave when ordered to do so."

Whether the Greensboro students knew it or not, in violating property rights as they did, they tapped into a long tradition within the history of Anglo-American property law. For as long as there has been private ownership, it seems, there have been groups who have sought to challenge the prerogatives of ownership in search of a more just social order. Sometimes these movements have succeeded. More often, they have not. But the pervasive influence of these property outlaw tactics on the development of American property doctrine cannot be denied. In Property Outlaws, we explore the sit-in episode (along with scores of other examples of property lawbreaking) to try to extract broader lessons about the interaction between disobedience and ownership.

Today, forty years after the civil rights movement, we see this dialectic emerge time and time again in contemporary urban and rural environments, with respect to both tangible and intangible forms of property. The bike collective Critical Mass takes over the streets of metropolitan cities in order to reinvent the concept of public space; urban community gardeners take over vacant lots to beautify the city and create a sense of shared ecological responsibility; pirate microradio stations in the Bay Area and mashup artists interrupt everyday sonic worlds; cyberactivists like the Electronic Disturbance Theatre and others mount international electronic civil disobedience campaigns. The debates that frequently accompany these movements continue to unfold.

Drawing, in part upon the historical and contemporary context, our aim is to broaden the focus of property and intellectual property discussions beyond the common recognition of property's need for stability to include its need for dynamism, an ability to change and to fluctuate according to shifting norms, values, and social realities. We hope to rehabilitate, at least to a certain extent, the image of the intentional property outlaw, and to show how she has repeatedly played an integral role in producing our system of property and intellectual property. In doing so, we also hope to shed light on a complex and subtle tension: at the same time that property seems to be so stable and orderly, it also masks a latent instability that stems from the persistence of transgression. Far from universally undermining the value of property, however, this underlying instability is frequently constructive and indeed, necessary to prevent the entire edifice from becoming outdated.

The value of at least certain instances of disobedience is twofold. First, there may in certain situations be value in the outlaw's directly redistributive conduct. That is, there may be circumstances under which we assess that the lawbreaker's decision to take someone else's property, either for himself or to give to another, is itself valuable. We refer to this phenomenon as the lawbreaker's creation of "redistributive value." Second, in cases of persistent, widespread lawbreaking, citizen behavior may communicate useful information to property owners and to the state, indicating that some element of a property law, or some dimension of the owners' use of property, may be out of date or unjust in some respect. We refer to this signaling function provided by outlaw conduct as its "informational value." If property and intellectual property rights were perfectly enforced, either through draconian penalties or certain enforcement, each of these categories of potential value would be eliminated.

The implications of this insight differ somewhat for tangible and intellectual property. In the area of tangible property, our proposals are relatively modest, largely because the law of tangible property already contains within it a number of venerable doctrines that, in our view, acknowledge the value of a significant amount of lawbreaking. Doctrines such as adverse possession (often referred to as "squatters rights") and necessity (which permits people in emergency situations to take what they need in order to survive), provide mechanisms for nonconsensual transfers of property under certain constrained conditions. Although there have been some efforts in recent years to roll these doctrines back or limit their application, we favor preserving them and perhaps even expanding them in a number of respects. In the context of intellectual property, pervasive uncertainty as to the scope of the actual entitlement generates space for disobedience but also causes a great deal of productive behavior to labor under the threat of crippling statutory penalties.

Our aim, therefore, is to broaden the focus so that the discussion of disobedience is not just about property's need for stability, but also its need for dynamism, its ability to change and to fluctuate according to shifting norms, values, and social realities. In other words, we hope to rehabilitate, at least to a certain extent, the image of the property outlaw, and to show how she has repeatedly played an integral role in producing our system of property and intellectual property. Time and again, groups of people have intentionally violated property laws, and in a number of important cases, the law of property has responded by shifting to accommodate their demands, in the process bringing those groups back within the fold of the law-abiding community.

For the attorney mulling a jump into the blogosphere to expand business by trumpeting expertise, a recent ABA article, as noted by The Wall Street Journal, provides a good starting point. In "Memoirs of a Blogger," Mark Herrmann, an attorney and one-time legal blogger, offers tips on how to launch a blog and flags some pitfalls to avoid. As the WSJ article notes, however, Herrmann, who once blogged at the Drug and Device Law Blog, illuminates many drawbacks for launching a blog, such as finding enough topics to write about, carving a niche in a blogosphere that is always expanding and already is burgeoning with hundreds of millions, and keeping and attracting readers.

Herrmann writes:

Be provocative; be funny; be distinctive. Perhaps most importantly, don't be staid. A blog written by a committee of starched-shirt, bureaucratic lawyers might proclaim: "Our firm has the utmost respect for our learned adversaries, whose experience in complex, multi-jurisdiction litigation nearly matches our own." We'd write: "Those clowns couldn't spell ‘FDA' if you spotted ‘em two letters." We might not have much institutional gravitas, but we sure as heck have readers.

See the WSJ article for a link to Herrmann's pointers. 

[image via masternewmedia.org]

The Washington Post reported this morning that between 2002 and 2006 the FBI "illegally collected more than 2,000 telephone records ... by invoking terrorism emergencies that did not exist or simply persuading phone companies to provide records, according to internal bureau memos and interviews." The Post noted that a Justice Department inspector general report due this month is likely to conclude that the spy agency "frequently violated the law with its emergency requests, bureau officials confirmed." TalkLeft has a detailed account of the newspaper's reporting on the illegally obtained phone records here.

The newspaper continued, "Documents show that senior FBI managers up to the assistant director level approved the procedures for emergency requests of phone records and that headquarters officials often made the requests, which persisted for two years after bureau lawyers raised concerns and an FBI official began pressing for changes."

Wired's David Kravets notes a "landmark" federal court decision of last week that a string of torrent Web sites are unlawful, allowing for massive copyright infringements. Wired said the Dec. 21 decision, while not unexpected, is "the first in the United in which a federal judge found that" torrent or BitTorrent Web search engines are "an unlawful avenue to free movies, music, videogames and software."

The lawsuit was lodged by Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), and resulted in a summary judgment ruling against www.isohunt.com, www.torrentbox.com, www.podtropolis.com and www.ed2k-it.com, all owned by Gary Fung. The plaintiffs, U.S. District Judge Stephen V. Wilson wrote, "asserted that, through his operation and promotion of the websites, Fung allows users to download infringing copies of popular movies, television shows, sound recordings, software programs, video games, and other copyrighted content free of charge. "

Judge Wilson dismissed Fung's arguments that his sites were distinguishable from other file-sharing sites that have been shuttered for copyright infringements, such as Napster.

The judge wrote in Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc., et al., v. Fung:

These technological details are, at their core, indistinguishable from previous technologies. In fact, Defendants' technologies appear to improve upon the previous technologies by permitting faster downloads are large files such as movies. Such an improvement quite obviously increases the potential for copyright infringement.

Fung told Wired that he was considering an appeal, maintaining that provisions in copyright law should protect Torrent sites that remove content when requested by rights-holders.

[Image via the Law Office of Lisa N. Kaufman.]

Does your employer have access to your personal e-mail accounts if they are accessed at work? The answer was once, almost uniformly, "yes."

The Wall Street Journal reports: 

In past years, courts showed sympathy for corporations that monitored personal email accounts accessed over corporate computer networks. Generally, judges treated corporate computers, and anything on them, as company property.
Now, courts are increasingly taking into account whether employers have explicitly described how email is monitored to their employees.

Recent decisions cited by the Journal include cases in New Jersey and San Francisco resolved in favor of employees, who were determined to have a reasonable expectation of privacy. The San Francisco decision is being appealed to the Supreme Court.

Following his participation in a recent ACS event on privacy concerns in a digital age, George Washington University Law School Professor Jeffrey Rosen talked with ACSblog about the changing landscape of privacy rights. Rosen said the "stakes for privacy rights have never been higher," noting that so much of what we do in cyberspace can be stored and accessed by others. Watch Rosen's interview below or download a podcast of it here.

Here are my thoughts on the Bilski v. Kappos oral argument held yesterday, which is better informed by also having watched Pamela Samuelson, John Duffy, Kevin Collins, and John Whealan discuss the argument late yesterday afternoon at George Washington University. The argument was fascinating, and the Justices were very well prepared and were a very hot bench (particularly Justice Sotomayor).

Surprisingly, but from my perspective happily, Justice Scalia focused very early into the Petitioner's argument on the "useful arts" language from the Constitution (or on similar language from early patentable subject matter statutes -- "new and useful art" -- as Justice Scalia did not explicitly reference the Constitution) and whether patent eligible inventions must fall within manufacturing and similar industries. Michael Jakes did a very good job responding - and holding his ground when pushed under substantial questioning from many Justices to define a limit to what qualifies as patent eligible - by adverting to examples of patentable business inventions from his brief and reasons why "technologies" have and should continue to be viewed broadly and why the patent system is not limited to traditional industrial inventions. Jakes to his credit (and as a testament to zealous advocacy on behalf of a client with a possibly losing position) also refused to provide any helpful response to the Justices when pressed to offer a fall-back position in case his basic position was rejected. This was particularly notable in his responses to Justice Breyer's repeated requests for more guidance, after Justice Breyer clearly signaled that the Court might not agree that patentable subject matter is as broad as Jakes was arguing. Justice Roberts also pressed Jakes on the issue of why Claim 1 was not merely an abstract idea, and Justice Stevens pressed Jakes on the difference of the claim at issue from that in Diehr (particularly in regard to its physicality). Jakes made clear why he believed his clients' claim was both practical and physical, focusing in particular on the step of entering into transactions. He also articulated why his clients are entitled to have their claim reviewed on the other patentability criteria, although some of the Justices may believe that the claim also may not be new or at least is obvious. Although his clients' invention provided little in the way of physicality like that of traditional industrial processes, Jakes nevertheless presented a strong (maximalist) approach to patentable subject matter to justify treating the invention as potentially eligible, the scope of which appeared to be limited only by the Court's historic, articulated exclusions for science, nature, and abstract ideas (understood narrowly but applied to all four categories of statutory subject matter, i.e., processes, machines, manufactures, and compositions of matter). Thus, when pressed by Chief Justice Roberts, Jakes argued that an alphabet could be patented, which led to an unproductive exchange with Justice Sotomayor about Morse's code claim, which was in fact found patentable as Jakes articulated but which raises unanswered questions of claim interpretation regarding how closely "tethered" that claim was to Morse's apparatus. This argument may not have been the best strategic choice by Jakes, as his clients' position could readily have been sustained without trying to uphold alphabet patents. Curiously, Jakes also argued that the Bell telephone patent would not pass the Federal Circuit's transformation test, which led to an unproductive exchange with Justice Scalia about whether the Bell telephone patent involved a physical transformation (of sound into electrical signals and back again). Jakes also conceded (at no cost to his clients' position) that mental processes and data (by itself), literature and fine arts are not patentable subject matter.

Many of the Justices appeared concerned over certain types of inventions being considered patent eligible, although their reasons for wanting to keep them outside the system were not entirely clear. For example, Justice Breyer express concern over hypothetical claims directed to teaching antitrust courses; Justice Ginsberg expressed concern over tax and estate planning method inventions; Justice Kennedy expressed concern over inventions relating to insurance risks determined from actuarial tables; Justice Stevens expressed concern over the invention at issue in the State Street Bank case - a programmed computer performing calculations for use in business; Chief Justice Roberts expressed concern over the patenting of alphabets; Justice Scalia expressed concern over the method of winning friends and influencing people; and Justice Sotomayor expressed concern over patents for speed dating. All of the Justices clearly understood that the case would have implications for software and medical diagnostic inventions, so the myriad amicus briefs were at least successful in getting this point across. The issue of the effects of the machine or transformation test on such inventions became a focus for discussion of the kinds of line drawing that the Court should adopt - and that the claim at issue did not require. As Samuelson put it in a discussion after the argument - perhaps with J.R.R. Tolkein's masterpiece in mind - the question is whether there will be "one test to rule them all."

Malcolm Stewart for the Government also did a good job articulating the Government's basic position, which was that they are hoping to establish the "machine or transformation" test in this case as the baseline, and to leave questions about what that means and how it applies to subsequent development in cases where some machines are employed or more substantial physical transformations are at issue. However, serious concerns were expressed - particularly by Justice Stevens -- about whether implementing a process like the claim at issue (or software) on a computer was sufficient for patentability. Various Justices pressed Stewart on the patentability of the State Street Bank machine claim and whether the Court's holding in this case can and should be limited to "processes," given the ability to draft process claims in programmed computer (machine) formats, even though the process or software is the real invention. Thus, after expressing skepticism about the patentability of claim at issue, Chief Justice Roberts took serious issue with a footnote in the Government's brief that stated that if Bilski's claim included implementation by an interactive website or calculations performed by a computer it might be patentable. Justice Alito in contrast focused on whether the Court should avoid ruling on the broader (but more important) grounds of the "machine or transformation" test, given the Government's alternative argument that the claim would not survive the "preemption" test (articulated in Gottschalk v. Benson, where a claim preempts all uses of the abstract idea). Stewart responded that the Government would much prefer the machine or transformation grounds for the holding, so as to give the PTO and the Federal Circuit the opportunity to develop further rules on eligibility elaborating the test. Stewart also provided two very helpful arguments that support Petitioners (and others seeking broader protection). Stewart argued against alternative bases for the Court's holding that were suggested by Justice Ginsberg, i.e., finding that business methods are entirely outside of the patent system or that claims like the one at issue are not technological (like in foreign jurisdictions). Stewart sought to warn the Court off the broad business method holding by arguing that some business-related computer-implemented inventions (particularly software inventions) have been held patentable by the Federal Circuit and should be held patentable. Similarly, he sought to warn the Court off a holding based on limiting the definition of technology, because of the difficulty of defining technology and because of the consequent need to determine whether a claim is sufficiently technological when it incorporates particular machines or achieves some physical transformations. (Implicit in these arguments and in the Justices concern over line drawing is the point at the heart of the amicus brief that I filed, that the Court must confront point-of-novelty analysis and determine what the "invention" is; otherwise, it cannot determine whether the machine implementations or physical transformations are mere additions to the claimed invention or are integral to it.) Justice Ginsburg also asked about the origins of the machine or transformation test and Justice Kennedy tried to get Stewart to provide clarity over what constituted a transformation, referring to the State Street Bank invention. Stewart noted the origins of the test in the Government's Benson brief (written by Richard Stern, when he was at the Department of Justice, who also filed an amicus brief in the Bilski case tat focused on the historic meaning of "useful arts") and acknowledged that it was asserted by the Government below in the Bilski case. Stewart argued that the Government now clearly supports the State Street Bank holding; in contrast, the Government had hesitated at Court of Appeals to approve of the invention at issue in the State Street Bank case. This led Justice Stevens to make cogent points about machine claims not being materially different from process claims, and Justice Roberts then noted that the State Street Bank invention did not transform anything physical. Possibly, some other Justices also may want to assure that whatever restrictions their holding imposes, it will not be avoided simply by changing claim formats.

Surprisingly, there was little discussion of statutory construction of the term "process," of the 1952 Act, or of the later-enacted Section 273. Stewart did focus briefly on the "anything under the sun" language from the 1952 Act's legislative history, noting that it applied only to machines or manufactures and not to processes. The lack of discussion of the statutory language may suggest that the Court is likely to follow its prior holdings of not reading "process" literally and then providing judge-made limits on what can be patented. There was also little discussion over the historical meaning of "useful arts," although Justice Scalia made a humorous point about the importance of horses to the American economy. Nor was there any discussion of the other potential constitutional limits on the patent power, i.e., "promoting the Progress" or "Inventors ... for their ... Discoveries," although Jakes did refer on a few occasions to the benefits of both invention and disclosure accomplished by granting patents. Nevertheless, again as Samuelson put it, the "spirit" of the Constitution and the beliefs at the time of its framing were clearly "in the air" from the Justices discussions of numerous old technologies (including Justice Kennedy's references to the discoveries of calculus and of life expectancy and actuarial tables in 1680). Stewart also made the point about the "dog that didn't bark," arguing that American economic history would have looked very different if business methods such as the method of allocating risk at issue would have been considered patent eligible. Thus, although a strong constitutional holding that would limit or strike down legislation is unlikely, the Court clearly was concerned about the constitutional purposes and may read the statutory term "process" narrowly in light of those purposes (as I argued it should in my brief, citing the constitutional conflicts that would result from a broad interpretation that should be avoided by statutory construction under the Ashwander doctrine).

Although some of the discussion focused on examples of transformations and whether they were sufficient for patentability, there was almost no discussion of what kind of "particular" machine may have been needed for patentability. This is not particularly surprising, given that the claim at issue did not present any question of machine implementation. But it forced the Court to resort to hypotheticals (and the State Street Bank invention) to try to draw out the implications of the various potential holdings. Jakes was not willing to offer up lines that would help the Court restrict subject matter, and Stewart similarly was trying to avoid any ruling that would prejudge such line drawing in future cases. The discussion of how to draw the lines thus was less than edifying for the Court, and at least Justice Stevens and possibly Justice Kennedy appeared unconvinced that the invention at issue in State Street Bank - even though it was claimed in machine format - should have been patent eligible.

If I were to make a prediction, it would be that the Court is likely to do what it did in the eBay v. MercExchange case. There will be a unanimous, core holding of nine Justices that the claim at issue is not patent eligible, and the Court will thus affirm the PTO's rejection of it. And there will also be a series of concurrences (perhaps with more factions than the two in eBay) articulating different perspectives on what lines of distinction the future cases should consider. The core holding will be very narrow - likely limited to saying that the claim at issue (and others like it) that are not tied to any physical technology and that are not traditional physical processes (like industrial or chemical production) are not the kind of processes that the patent system was designed to encompass. The Court may also distinguish the claim at issue from the industrial process at issue in Diamond v. Diehr (which the Court found to be eligible). The decision will probably mention the constitutional language of "useful arts," and possibly even mention "promote the Progress" (although it is unlikely to focus on "Inventors ... for their ... Discoveries," which was the focus of my brief), but in doing so may not imply any actual limitation on legislative power. Rather, it may imply that Congress would not have lightly meant to extend the patent system beyond the traditional limits to apply to such "abstract" inventions, and may briefly mention and dismiss as not dispositive the recognition by Congress in Section 273 that business methods had become patent eligible as a result of the State Street Bank decision - suggesting that the history does not signal a legislative intent to expand the patent system beyond its traditional contours. The Court may also indicate (contrary to the Government's desire) that the machine or transformation test has never been framed as a strict limit, and more importantly that the machine or transformation test is not helpful to deciding what is eligible as it provides no test for what kind of machine implementation or physical transformation is sufficient. And thus the hard issues will be left for future cases - and the bar will have lots of continued work advising clients in prosecution and litigating these issues until the next time the Court provides more guidance.

The concurrences, in contrast, will articulate very different potential tests of patent eligibility and thus very different routes to reaching the core "holding." Justice Stevens will likely write a concurrence - possibly joined by Justices Kennedy and Breyer -- reasserting his position in Parker v. Flook that patent eligibility requires a different inventive concept than the mere application of science, nature, or abstract ideas to a particular context without significant post-solution activity (on which grounds the claim at issue should fail). Chief Justice Roberts - possibly joined by Justice Alito - may write a concurrence based on the "abstract" v. "applied" approach to eligibility and suggesting why the claim at issue is abstract even though it requires some physical activity. Justice Ginsburg - possibly joined by Justices Scalia and Sotomayor -- may write a concurrence based on excluding business methods from the patent system or holding that such methods are not technological and that nothing in the claim requires technology so as to bring the claim back within the scope of the patent system. That leaves Justices Thomas, who having (as usual) asked no questions remains an enigma.

P.S. Justice Breyer clearly understood the potential takings concerns of a broad holding of patent eligibility, noting that Congress had never taken out of the patent system any technologies or activities found by the Court to fall within it. This will supply further grounds to rule narrowly, particularly if the Court is reluctant to reach software claims in this case that does not present them (as articulated as the major concern of the Government). Although Jakes coherently responded that Congress had in fact responded to the Federal Circuit's expansions of patentable subject matter by limiting enforcement of business methods and medical and surgical procedures, it is not a full response to Justice Breyer's concern--as it does not take such patents out of the system and (as evidenced in the Laboratory Corp. v. Metabolite case) they still may provide the basis for secondary liability (and for business methods, which were not at issue in LabCorp, for extensive direct liability).

The techtonic plates underlying Congress's system of incentives encouraging American ingenuity are rumbling at the U.S. Supreme Court this afternoon. As stated by IPWatchDog founder Gene Quinn, "the fate of much future innovation rests squarely on the Supreme Court getting this one right."

In Bilski v. Kappos, the Court faces the task of defining the scope of patentability under the U.S. Patent Act. Specifically, the issue is whether a process is patentable which is not tied to a machine and fails to physically transform some material.

The litigant's invention in Bilski is a business process permitting users to hedge against risks of price shocks in comodities markets. Here's one example of the invention's use provided by petitioners: "A school district with a fixed tax base and budget for heating or cooling requirements can be protected from yearly fluctuations in weather, while the suppliers are protected from the opposite effect of such fluctuations."

So, relying on a series of complex mathematical formulas, the process moderates the risk of price fluctuations for raw materials. The process is tied to no machine, however, and also fails to transform any tangible material -- requirements of patentable processes under the "machine-or-transformation" test applied by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

Both sides agree that reverberations from the Court's Bilski decision will be considerable. Proponents for the petitioner, who is seeking to have his business process patented, argue that failing to permit patents for business processes ties patent law to the industrial age of machines and manufacturing and would discourage innovation in the digital age. Adherents to the machine-or-transformation test, however, assert that Bilski's invention is nothing more than an abstract idea like the Theory of Relativity -- a mere statement of fact or natural occurrence which cannot properly be the dominion of any one person.

"If nothing else about the case leads the Court to see it as highly important, the flow of amici filings surely should," reports Lyle Denniston. "In a volume that is usually reached only in the most highly visible, most deeply controversial cases, the friend-of-court briefs are stacked high. There are 68 overall." 

The case is scheduled to be argued before the Court at 1 p.m. EST today.

After providing a keynote address at a recent ACS event on privacy concerns in a digital age, Christopher N. Olsen, the assistant director in the Federal Trade Commission's Division of Privacy and Identity Protection, noted in an interview with ACSBlog that the agency plans several forums for hearing input on the tackling online privacy concerns. Watch Olsen's interview below or download a podcast of it here.

Noting increasing concern over what personal information is available and easily disseminated online, Google today announced a product aimed at giving its users greater control over their information. Google Dashboard, according to a post from the online search company's official blog, will allow users to see what information is collected about them and to control how it's used. From the post:

Designed to be simple and useful, the Dashboard summarizes data for each product that you use (when you signed in to your account) and provides you direct links to control your personal settings. Today, the Dashboard covers more than 20 products and services, including Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Web History, Orkut, YouTube, Picasa, Talk, Reader, Alerts, Latitude and many more.

The post also includes video on how to use the dashboard.

On Tuesday, Alan Davidson, director of public policy for Google in the Americas, participated in a panel discussion hosted by ACS on privacy concerns in an increasingly digital age. During the discussion, Davidson said the company was committed to advancing policy to ensure greater privacy for its users. Video of the event, which also included a keynote address from Federal Trade Commission Assistant Director in the Division of Privacy and Identity Protection Christopher N. Olsen, is available here.