Wednesday, July 15, 2020


Think it can’t happen here?
And this, kids, is a great reminder of why people can never really trust their government with their health/medical information. They may collect it with a set of promises about confidentiality and then decide they can violate their promises. Or in some cases, there may be no law at all specifically protecting your medical info and your government will share it with …. your neighbors… in the name of public safety.
From the Jakarta Post:
The national COVID-19 task force is considering releasing patients’ personal data in an effort to encourage adherence to health protocols in affected areas.
Task force chief and National Disaster Mitigation Agency (BNPB) head Doni Monardo said such data would only be made available to people living in the patients’ neighborhoods.
Read more on Jakarta Post.


(Related) “We don’t need no stinking Doctors!”
Trump Administration Strips CDC of Control of Coronavirus Data
The New York Times – “The Trump administration has ordered hospitals to bypass the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and send all Covid-19 patient information to a central database in Washington beginning on Wednesday. The move has alarmed health experts who fear the data will be politicized or withheld from the public. The new instructions were posted recently in a little-noticed document on the Department of Health and Human Services website. From now on, the department — not the C.D.C. — will collect daily reports about the patients that each hospital is treating, the number of available beds and ventilators, and other information vital to tracking the pandemic. Officials say the change will streamline data gathering and assist the White House coronavirus task force in allocating scarce supplies like personal protective gear and remdesivir, the first drug shown to be effective against the virus. But the Health and Human Services database that will receive new information is not open to the public, which could affect the work of scores of researchers, modelers and health officials who rely on C.D.C. data to make projections and crucial decisions…”




Another regulator talks security.
SEC’s OCIE Issues Ransomware Risk Alert
Kate Hanniford of Alston & Bird writes:
On July 10, the SEC’s Office of Compliance Inspections and Examinations (OCIE) issued a Risk Alert noting the increasing sophistication of ransomware attacks on SEC registrants and service providers to SEC registrants. The Risk Alert is notable for its encouragement of financial services market participants more broadly and not just SEC registrants to monitor CISA alerts, and for the specificity of the cybersecurity measures it includes as recognized defenses to current ransomware threats.
[From the Blog:
The Risk Alert includes two new observations related to operational resiliency, first that registrants are determining which systems and processes are capable of being restored during a disruption so business services can continue. Second, it notes that registrants are focusing on the capability to continue operations in the event a primary system is unavailable, which underscores the importance of “geographic separation of back-up data, and writing back-up data to an immutable storage system in the event primary data sources are unavailable.”


(Related) Continuity of Privacy.
COVID-19 and GDPR: Organizational Considerations for Business Continuity of Privacy Compliance Programs
Businesses are facing new and exceptional challenges in connection with the COVID-19 outbreak. In times of uncertainty, ensuring the ongoing availability of resources within an organization is important to limit disruption to daily business operations and maintain appropriate internal governance. This article discusses key steps businesses may consider taking to ensure the business continuity of their privacy compliance programs during the COVID-19 pandemic.




Is law enforcement’s use of facial recognition also Technology Theatre?
Technology Theatre
On June 18, 2020, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that Canada would join the ranks of governments launching a mobile contact-tracing application as part of the national response to COVID-19. That announcement came a few days after Norway’s government shut down its app for failing a necessity and proportionality analysis, the United Kingdom abandoned its contact-tracing app project in favour of the Google-Apple model and reports that Australia’s app was working on just 25 percent of phones. In other words, there was a lot of attention paid to contact-tracing apps at all political levels, despite their questionable — if not actively harmful — role in the response to COVID-19.
Whether it’s the national release of contact-tracing apps meant to battle a pandemic, or Sidewalk Labs’ (now defunct) bid to create a “city built from the internet up,public conversations about major policy initiatives tend to focus on technological components and evade significantly harder questions about power and equity.




Does your insurance provide any assurance?
Beyond Data Breach: Evaluating Coverage for Misuse of Information Claims
New and comprehensive privacy and cyber regulations continue to proliferate across the globe. These are not your father’s data breach notification laws.
In addition, these mandates typically are not limited to data breach and disclosure situations; they often apply to how covered entities treat protected information throughout its entire lifecycle, from collection or creation, through use, retention, security, until ultimate disposition. They may create disclosure obligations concerning the entity’s information-related practices as well as actionable rights for affected individuals. Some laws require that companies create certain roles such as a data protection officer or a chief information security officer, and establish requirements concerning oversight by corporate boards. They also may mandate creation of specific internal and/or publicly-facing written policies and procedures. In addition to empowering enforcement by a state attorney general or other governmental or regulatory agency, these new laws and regulations sometimes provide a private right of action to affected individuals, pursuant to which they can seek statutory and/or actual damages.
Cyber insurance policies typically include coverage for claims arising out of violations of cyber and privacy laws and regulations, but the coverage provided can vary greatly from policy to policy. When considering whether any given claim falls within a policy’s coverage, the following issues should be considered:




Still short of consensus.
Ethical and societal implications of algorithms, data, and artificial intelligence: a roadmap for research
Whittlestone, J. Nyrup, R. Alexandrova, A. Dihal, K. Cave, S. (2019) Ethical and societal implications of algorithms, data, and artificial intelligence: a roadmap for research. London: Nuffield Foundation. “The aim of this report is to offer a broad roadmap for work on the ethical and societal implications of algorithms, data, and AI (ADA) in the coming years. It is aimed at those involved in planning, funding, and pursuing research and policy work related to these technologies. We use the term ‘ADA-based technologies’ to capture a broad range of ethically and societally relevant technologies based on algorithms, data, and AI, recognising that these three concepts are not totally separable from one another and will often overlap. A shared set of key concepts and concerns is emerging, with widespread agreement on some of the core issues (such as bias) and values (such as fairness) that an ethics of algorithms, data, and AI should focus on. Over the last two years, these have begun to be codified in various codes and sets of ‘principles’. Agreeing on these issues, values and high-level principles is an important step for ensuring that ADA-based technologies are developed and used for the benefit of society. However, we see three main gaps in this existing work: (i) a lack of clarity or consensus around the meaning of central ethical concepts and how they apply in specific situations; (ii) insufficient attention given to tensions between ideals and values; (iii) insufficient evidence on both (a) key technological capabilities and impacts, and (b) the perspectives of different publics.”




I would base my European operations in Ireland too.
Apple wins appeal against $15 billion EU tax bill
Apple has won its appeal against a European Commission ruling that it owed Ireland €13 billion ($14.9 billion) in taxes.
The European Union's second highest court ruled Wednesday that the Commission had not proven that the company had received illegal state aid from Ireland through favorable tax agreements.
The European Commission — Europe's top antitrust authority — said in 2016 that the Irish government had granted Apple an illegal advantage by helping the iPhone maker keep its tax bill artificially low for more than 20 years.
But Ireland didn't want the money. The small country became the European base for companies such as Apple, Google (GOOGL) and Facebook (FB) because it has one of the lowest corporate tax rates in Europe. So it teamed up with Apple to fight the Commission.
"The correct amount of Irish tax was charged taxation in line with normal Irish taxation rules," the finance ministry said in a statement.
Margrethe Vestager, the Commission's top antitrust official, said she was carefully studying the judgment before deciding on next steps. But she vowed that the Commission would continue to aggressively pursue what it considers "illegal state aid."




Tools for handouts?
Book Creator Adds New Options for Copying and Re-using Pages
Book Creator is one of my go-to tools for making ebooks and digital portfolios. In fact, I like it so much that it's one of the featured tools in my Practical Ed Tech Virtual Summer Camp. And now there is a new feature that makes Book Creator better than ever. That new feature is the option to copy multiple pages from one of your books and re-use them in another book.
In Book Creator you can now copy and re-use any of the pages in your books including the cover page. This can be done within the same book or be done between multiple books.
As Book Creator wrote in their Tweet announcing this new feature, copying and pasting pages could be quite useful in creating a template that you want students to use for their books. I find that when using Book Creator as a tool for a portfolio it's nice to have students follow the same structure. Following the same structure makes it easier for a teacher to quickly locate an artifact related to a topic or standard within a portfolio.




Helping my students move on…
The 6 Best Resume Review Websites to Help You Update Your Resume



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