If “Right” means doing exactly what
they set out to do, then they are doing it right. If their auditors
looked at their process and asked a few questions related to Best
Privacy Practices they may have avoided all this kerfuffle.
Path
CEO: ‘We Thought We Were Doing This Right’
“We thought we were doing this the
right way. It turns out, we made a mistake.”
… Arun Thampi of Singapore
discovered that Path
uploads users’ address book information to Path’s servers.
This action isn’t in Path’s Terms of Use, and it’s enraged a
user community concerned about privacy rights.
Some social media companies, including
Path, subscribe to a philosophy that says access to your personal
data — if used safely and in the right way — can only improve
your experience. To this extent, address book data is the bread and
butter of Path, an app that distinguishes itself as “the first
truly personal network.”
“We don’t want to connect you with
just anyone on Path,” Morin says. “Without the contact list
information, some of these features just don’t work.”
(Ditto?)
Hipster
CEO Also Apologizes For Address Book-Gate, Calls For “Application
Privacy Summit” [Guest Post]
There seems to be much more here than
meets the eye. Why would the FBI think that companies that spend
more money each year on security than the FBI has wasted in the 12
years of their two year Case Management System upgrade can't get
security right? Perhaps their security is too good?
FBI
declares cloud vendors must meet CJIS security rules
… The CJIS database, maintained by
the FBI, is one of the world's largest repositories of criminal
history records and fingerprints.
The records are available to law
enforcement agencies and contractors around the country that comply
with the security rules, which include requirements that all data,
both in transit and at rest, be encrypted and that anyone
who accesses the database pass FBI background checks.
… "However," he added,
"these requirements aren't new to vendors serving the criminal
justice community and many vendors have successfully met these
requirements for years."
It can't be as bad as this article
suggests, can it?
Court
Revives Challenge to No-Fly List
A federal appeals court on Wednesday revived a Malaysian woman’s
legal fight against the United States’ no-fly list, ruling that she
may challenge her two-hour airport detention on allegations she was
wrongly singled out as a suspected terrorist.The woman, Rahinah Ibrahim, was detained, handcuffed and questioned for two hours at San Francisco International Airport in 2005 when she was told she was on the government’s no-fly list.
… “At this point in the
litigation, no court has attempted to determine the merits of
Ibrahim’s claims under the First and Fifth Amendments. The parties
have not briefed whether her placement on a terrorist watchlist
violates her rights to freedom of association, equal protection, and
due process,” Judge William Fletcher wrote
for the majority, (.pdf) which was joined by Judge Dorothy
Nelson.
… The evidence and procedures used
to place individuals on the list are secret. Also secret are the
reviews of people who ask to be removed from that list and from the
much larger “selectee list” which allows people to fly, but
requires they go through a pat-down or other extra screening.
… Following 9/11, the
appeals court noted, “tens of thousands of of travelers have been
misidentified because of misspellings and transcription errors”
and because of “computer algorithms that
imperfectly
match travelers against the names”
on watchlists. [Not sure why you would want an imperfect match...
Bob]
(Related) “We have met the enemy and
he is us!”
Department
of Homeland Security Disregards Public Comments and Issues Final Rule
that Undermines Traveler Privacy Rights
February 9, 2012 by Dissent
From EPIC.org:
The U.S. Customs
and Border Protection, a component within the Department of Homeland
Security, issued a final rule
approving Global Entry, a traveler screening program, despite
the substantial privacy and security risks brought to the agency’s
attention. Under the Global Entry program, the CBP
collects detailed personal information, including social security
numbers and biometric information, that should be subject to Privacy
Act safeguards. However, the agency rejected EPIC’s
recommendations
that it comply with the Privacy Act by limiting the distribution of
information to only those that need the information for screening
purposes. In EPIC’s comments, EPIC also noted that CBP violated
federal law by not conducting a Privacy Impact Assessment
before implementing the new Global Entry program. For more
information, see: EPIC:
Global Entry.
(It's not mandatory, but you can save
90%...) Will they publish their guide to “Driving like Miss
Daisy?”
"TomTom has signed a deal with
an insurance firm that will see its satnavs
used to monitor drivers. Fair Pay Insurance, part of Motaquote,
will use monitoring systems built into the
TomTom PRO 3100 [Apparently,
they have been planning this for some time. I wonder of they are
already recording how we drive? Bob] to watch
for sharp braking and badly managed turns, rewarding 'good' drivers
with lower premiums and warning less skilled motorists when they
aren't driving as they should. 'We've dispensed with
generalization's and said to our customers, if you believe you're a
good driver, we'll believe you and we'll even give you the benefit up
front,' said Nigel Lombard of Fair Pay Insurance."
Think there's a market for a “Doctor
of Privacy”
Definitions
of Privacy
February 8, 2012 by Dissent
Doctoral student Craig Blaha dropped me
a note to share some of his dissertation work on privacy. You can
read his overview on Definitions of Privacy on his
blog. He’d welcome your comments or feedback.
(Related) Redefining Privacy for the
benefit (amusement?) of the government.
Online
denizens: the government says you are better off passing out flyers
in a ski mask than Tweeting controversial material
February 8, 2012 by Dissent
More on the Twitter subpoena in the
Occupy Boston case. In today’s hearing, the government made some
truly outrageous claims.
This
post by PrivacySOS is an absolute must-read for everyone who uses
online social media and who believes in free speech and privacy. And
if you’re not livid by the time you get done reading it, let me
know.
It has more impact when the WSJ says
it...
"Europeans will take to the
streets this weekend in protest at the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade
Agreement, an international agreement that has given birth to an
ocean full of red herrings. That so many have spawned is, say
critics, in no small part down to the way in which this most
controversial of international agreements was drawn up. If
the negotiating parties had set out to stoke the flames of Internet
paranoia they
could not have done a better job. Accepted
there are two things that should never be seen being made in
public—laws and sausages—the ACTA process
could be a case study of how not to do it.
Conducted in secret, with little information shared except a few
leaked documents, the ACTA talks were even decried by those who were
involved in them."
Interesting reading...
February 08, 2012
From
The Atlantic - 150th Anniversary Edition - The Duty to Think
"On the 150th anniversary of the
Civil War, we present this commemorative
issue featuring Atlantic stories by Mark Twain, Henry James,
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne,
Louisa May Alcott, and many more."
- James Bennet editor of The Atlantic: "It is possible, in these pages, to enter into both the humanity of figures consecrated or condemned by history and the uncertainty the writers must have felt during the rush of events... It seemed to us that these Atlantic pieces have a way of conversing across the decades. And so in this issue, one finds Garry Wills’s account from 1992 of how Lincoln used the Gettysburg Address to reinterpret the Constitution and thereby “revolutionized the Revolution, giving people a new past to live with that would change their future indefinitely.” And then, equipped with that explication of how Lincoln purified the nation’s meaning, and with President Obama’s summation of what that meaning is, the reader can then encounter, with fresh appreciation, Lowell’s epitaph for Lincoln: “New birth of our new soil, the first American.”
Look, I'm certain the world is warmer
than when I was a kid. What concerns me is that “humans are
responsible and here's what we have to do about it” is apparently
based on some pretty crappy science. For example: How did anyone
conclude that “all the glaciers are melting” if we have never
before looked at all the glaciers?
The
Himalayas and nearby peaks have lost no ice in past 10 years, study
shows
The world's greatest snow-capped peaks,
which run in a chain from the Himalayas to Tian Shan on the border of
China and Kyrgyzstan, have lost no ice over the last decade, new
research shows.
The discovery has stunned scientists,
who had believed that around 50bn tonnes of meltwater were being shed
each year and not being replaced by new snowfall.
The study is the first
to survey all the world's icecaps and glaciers
and was made possible by the use of satellite data.
Overall, the contribution of melting ice outside the two largest caps
– Greenland
and Antarctica
– is much less than previously estimated, with the lack of ice loss
in the Himalayas and the other high peaks of Asia responsible for
most of the discrepancy.
Perspective: So, how can Cable TV
survive?
Nielsen:
Cord Cutting And Internet TV Viewing On The Rise
According to a new report from Nielsen,
the number of U.S. homes that have broadband Internet, but only free,
broadcast TV, is on the rise. Although representing less than 5% of
TV households, the number has grown 22.8% over the past year.
In addition, the behaviors within these
homes are unique. These broadband/broadcast-only households stream
video twice as much as the general population, says Nielsen, and they
watch half as much TV.
Since I keep posting lists of eBooks,
these might be handy.
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
EPUBReader
is a Firefox add-on that will allow you to read ePub documents within
your browser. EPUBReader downloads ePub files and displays them
directly in your browser. The video below offers a short
demonstration.
Magic
Scroll is a Chrome web app that you can use to read ePub files on
your desktop or laptop even if you do not have an internet
connection.
If you want to convert webpages into
ePub documents, dotEPUB
is a good Chrome web app for that. I previously wrote
about dotEPUB in October. Here is a video overview of dotEPUB.
I try to follow who is investing in
what. Occasionally you find interesting tools...
European accelerator HackFwd
just announced that Infogr.am from
Riga in Latvia as its latest investment. Infogr.am’s product is
gunning to be a kind of adobe illustrator for online,
allowing anyone to create cool info-graphics.
Free, interactive charts tool
[Invitation only so far Bob]
(Related)
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