Just because you know
how often this happens and how to easily minimize the risk of
identity theft is no guarantee that you actually implement any of
your own recommendations...
Ouch.
Howard Solomon reports:
Mistakes
can happen in any organization, but when the office of the federal
privacy commissioner loses an unencrypted
hard drive with personal information it must sting.
But
that’s what happened on Feb 14 during the agency’s move to
Gatineau, Que. from its home across the river in Ottawa.
The
Toronto Star revealed the loss in the print edition of the paper this
morning, and it was confirmed in an ITWorldCanada.com interview with
interim commissioner Chantal Bernier.
Read more on
ITWorldCanada.com.
Perhaps well
intentioned, perhaps the City Council realizes how easy this will
make it to round up all the “defectives” and put them in the
camps.
Corinne Lestch reports:
The
City Council is pushing for the creation of a medical registry for
people with developmental disabilities along with access to GPS
tracking devices in the wake of 14-year-old Avonte Oquendo’s death.
The
package of legislation, spearheaded by Council members Ruben Wills
(D-Queens) and Vanessa Gibson (D-Bronx) calls for a new voluntary
database controlled by the NYPD so that parents can register children
with disabilities at their local precincts.
Read more on The
Daily News.
I do not doubt the good
intentions of the legislators, but if this is essentially a medical
safety registry, why not create it under the Department of Health or
an agency that is covered by HIPAA so that there is greater
protection for the data? Turning over personal information of this
kind to the police gives them one more database that may wind up
misused at some point.
Detailed information
about you and your behavior is so valuable that the hot new skill
seems to be NSA Analyst experience. Big money in spying today.
Perhaps I should allow myself to be lured back?
Verizon
Wireless sells out customers with creepy new tactic
The company says it's
"enhancing" its Relevant Mobile Advertising program, which
it uses to collect data on customers' online habits so that marketers
can pitch stuff at them with greater precision.
… "This
identifier may allow an advertiser to use information they have about
your visits to websites from your desktop computer to deliver
marketing messages to mobile devices on our network," it says.
That means exactly what
it looks like: Verizon will monitor not just your
wireless activities but also what you do on your wired or
Wi-Fi-connected laptop or desktop computer — even if your computer
doesn't have a Verizon connection.
I've been trying to
explain this to my Statistics students. Since everything about you
is collected, everything about you is part of someone's analysis.
Since you can not use words like “pipe bomb” without being
involved in terrorism, your name will pop up. Then you get wiretaps,
beepers secretly attached to your car, and black helicopters to take
you to Guantanamo. Don't say I didn't warn you.
Elizabeth Joh has an
article in Washington Law Review that begins:
The
age of “big data” has come to policing. In Chicago, police
officers are paying particular attention to members of a “heat
list”: those identified by a risk analysis as most likely to be
involved in future violence.1 In Charlotte, North
Carolina, the police have compiled foreclosure data to generate a map
of high-risk areas that are likely to be hit by crime.2
In New York City, the N.Y.P.D. has partnered with Microsoft to employ
a “Domain Awareness System” that collects and links information
from sources like CCTVs, license plate readers, radiation sensors,
and informational databases.3 In Santa Cruz, California,
the police have reported a dramatic reduction in burglaries after
relying upon computer algorithms that predict where new burglaries
are likely to occur.4 The Department of Homeland Security
has applied computer analytics to Twitter feeds to find words like
“pipe bomb,” “plume,” and “listeria.”5
You can read the full
article here
(pdf).
If the Internet is
dragging us toward a world government, this is just one of the topics
we need to debate.
Orin Kerr has an
upcoming article in the Stanford Law Review that is
available for download on SSRN. Here’s the abstract:
This
article considers how Fourth Amendment law should adapt to the
increasingly worldwide nature of Internet surveillance. It focuses
on two types of problems not yet addressed by courts. First, the
Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Verdugo-Urquidez
prompts several puzzles about how the Fourth Amendment treats
monitoring on a global network where many lack Fourth Amendment
rights. For example, can online contacts help create those rights?
What if the government mistakenly believes that a target lacks Fourth
Amendment rights? How does the law apply to monitoring of
communications between those who have and those who lack Fourth
Amendment rights? The second category of problems follows from
different standards of reasonableness that apply outside the United
States and at the international border. Does the border search
exception apply to purely electronic transmission? And if
reasonableness varies by location, is the relevant location the
search, the seizure, or the physical person?
The
article explores and answers each of these questions through the lens
of equilibrium-adjustment. Today’s Fourth Amendment doctrine is
heavily territorial. The article aims to adapt existing principles
for the transition from a domestic physical environment to a global
networked world in ways that maintain the preexisting balance of
Fourth Amendment protection. On the first question, it rejects
online contacts as a basis for Fourth Amendment protection; allows
monitoring when the government wrongly but reasonably believes that a
target lacks Fourth Amendment rights; and limits monitoring between
those who have and those who lack Fourth Amendment rights. On the
second question, it contends that the border search exception should
not apply to electronic transmission and that reasonableness should
follow the location of data seizure. The Internet requires search
and seizure law to account for the new facts of international
investigations. The solutions offered in this article offer a set of
Fourth Amendment rules tailored to the reality of global computer
networks.
You can download the
article here.
Interesting
variation...
Facebook
courts journalists with newswire tool
Facebook said on Thursday that it has created a newswire tool
tailored to journalists, part of a broader effort to be the go-to
place for conversation for its 1 billion users.
Called FB Newswire, it is designed to help journalists share and
embed newsworthy Facebook content that is made public by its members
such as photos, status updates and videos.
(www.facebook.com/FBNewswire)
… Social media platforms have become a gold mine for journalists.
Facebook, Twitter, Google's YouTube and others are rich in source
material, as many people around the world use them to communicate,
including during periods of upheaval.
Acknowledging that many journalists use Twitter to uncover material,
Facebook is also providing a Twitter feed, @FBNewswire.
My concern is not that
Netflix will get better service (higher speeds) by paying more. I
worry that I'll get lousy service (slower speeds) because I won't pay
more.
FCC
throws in the towel on net neutrality
It was obvious from the
initial leaks that net neutrality advocates would view the new
FCC proposals as a sell-out. They're right. And yesterday FCC
Chairman Tom Wheeler used a tone of denial in a
statement that basically confirms the leaks.
The Commission hasn't
had much luck with their net neutrality proposals so far. Even
though the Appeals Court, in their last FCC smackdown, essentially
wrote the Commission a set of instructions on how to proceed in the
future, I get the sense that what the Commission wants
right now is something that they can call a victory and that won't be
in court until after the current administration is gone. So they
wrote rules that they thought the ISPs would go along with. It's a
politician's move, but I'm basically happy with it. I've
never thought much of net neutrality.
Okay, it's a fad.
Guess I'll need to read it.
How
a 700-page economics book surged to No. 1 on Amazon
(Related) Perhaps this
“Reader's Digest” version is enough.
Now that's interesting.
UPDATE
2-Ban on Tesla's direct-to-consumer sales 'bad policy' -FTC officials
In an unusual move, three top officials with the U.S. Federal Trade
Commission on Thursday expressed their opposition to laws that ban
automakers such as Tesla Motors Inc from selling their cars directly
to consumers.
… Dealers argue that their business model is good for consumers
because dealers compete on price and offer long-term service. They
see direct sales of any sort as an existential threat.
Change to the business
model? Perhaps Cable could learn to provide unbundled choices when
they see how much Netflix makes doing it. (Or someone could apply
the Netflix model to TV – NetTV?)
Netflix
finally comes to cable in the US
For the first time,
Netflix will be available in the US from its natural enemy: cable
companies. Atlantic Broadband, Grande Communications and
RCN all announced that subscribers will be able to access the
streaming service through their TiVo
DVRs as soon as April 28th. Of course, that's just a different
way of delivering regular Netflix streaming; you'll still need a
Netflix subscription on top of your DVR TiVo cable contract.
However, Atlantic said that accessing it would be as "easy as
changing the channel,"
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