Cory Doctorow reports what happened when a Northeastern University official tried to prove some sort of point about workspace efficiency by having heat sensors secretly installed under the desks of grad students in the school's Privacy Institute, in that fancy new ISEC building on the other side of train tracks from the main campus. It did not end well, although at least he didn't try to take anybody's red Swingline stapler, so the building still stands.

The Supreme Judicial Court today set out ways that police can subpoena tens of thousands of cell-phone records to try to link specific phone calls to crimes, in a case in which they used the technique to connect a Canton man to the murder of Jose Luis Phinn Williams at a Dorchester gas station and to a series of other similar, if less deadly, robberies that year in Mattapan, Canton and Cambridge. Read more.

Three Midwesterners whose names show up when you search for them on a commercial public-records Web site have sued, alleging that the way the site makes you buy a subscription to see their information violates their states' laws against the use of somebody's identity or "persona" in commercial ventures without their permission. Read more.

A federal appeals court ruled yesterday that people have the right to surreptitiously record police officers at work in "public spaces" such as parks, agreeing with two local activists that the First Amendment takes precedence over a state law banning private recording in that circumstance. Read more.

The Supreme Judicial Court today ordered a lower-court judge to reconsider her ruling that the state can refuse to give the Boston Globe copies of databases of birth and marriage records that are available as public records to anyone willing to pay $9 an hour to sit at a terminal in a state office on Columbia Point. Read more.

In decisions issued last week and today, a federal judge allowed lawsuits questioning the constitutionality of a Massachusetts ban on recording "private" discussions to go forward - but said the state has a legitimate stake in protecting the privacy rights of its citizens. Read more.

The Dig reports on how IBM and the city teamed up on a pilot surveillance program to record every single person who attended the two Boston Calling events at City Hall Plaza last year.

City officials did not extend the program to this year's concerts in part because they couldn't figure out a good public-safety need to do so. Also, the Dig reports, the city hasn't come up with any privacy policies for all those photos.

The Supreme Judicial Court ruled today that police cannot obtain location data kept by wireless providers without a search warrant.

In a split decision, the state's highest court said that while federal law allows law-enforcement officers to get a customer's "cell site location information" through a court order, Massachusetts law requires them to show they have probable cause to believe the information is directly related to a crime - a higher legal standard - under the privacy limits of Article 14 of the state constitution.

According to stats by the state Attorney General's office on data breaches, as reported by the Globe.