What could possibly go wrong?

http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/031444.html

September 30, 2012

DHS Privacy Policy for Operational Use of Social Media

Public Intelligence: "The following is an instruction accompanying DHS Policy Directive 110-01 “Privacy Policy for Operational Use of Social Media” that was enacted in June 2012. The policy directive itself is only three pages and provides little information, whereas this instruction for the policy is ten pages and includes rules for compliance with the directive. The policy was enacted following congressional hearings earlier this year that criticized DHS’ monitoring of social media. However, this privacy policy specifically exempts the use of social media for “situational awareness by the National Operations Center” which was the focus of the hearings."

Not all wishes are equally desireable...

EU Privacy Watchdog To ICANN: Law Enforcement WHOIS Demands "Unlawful"

"WHOIS was invented as an address book for sysadmins. These days, it's more likely to be used by Law Enforcement to identify a perpetrator or victim of an online crime. With ICANN's own study showing that 29% of WHOIS data is junk, it's no surprise that Law Enforcement have been lobbying ICANN hard to improve WHOIS accuracy. The EU's privacy watchdog, the Article 29 Data Protection Working Party, has stepped into the fray with a letter claiming that two of Law Enforcement's twelve asks are "unlawful" (PDF). The problem proposals are data retention — where registrant details will be kept for up to two years after a domain has expired — and re-verification, where a registrant's phone number and e-mail will be checked annually and published in the WHOIS database. The community consultation takes place at ICANN 45 in Toronto on October 15th."

For my Data Mining and Data Analysis students...

http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/30/data-markets-the-emerging-data-economy/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29

Data Markets: The Emerging Data Economy

… The term data market brings to mind a traditional structure in which vendors sell data for money. Indeed, this form of market is on the rise with companies large and small jumping in. Think of Azure Data Marketplace (Microsoft), data.com (Salesforce.com), InfoChimps.com, and DataMarket.com.

While this model allows organizations to acquire valuable data, the term is evolving to include a variety of forms, each with varying degrees of adoption success. At the heart of it, data markets enable organizations to access data in new ways, where the currency does not only have to be money, but can be in the form of data or insight.

There is also a trend where companies can outsource certain aspects of data management, especially around reference or canonical datasets, to a third party that specializes in assembling and curating datasets or creating value from data in other ways. As a result, new data economies are being formed where data can be created, accessed, rented, and perpetually maintained in a more simple and affordable way.

… Consider the following examples:

• Jigsaw has created a data market in which individuals and organizations provide contact information in a central repository. Jigsaw curates that data and distributes in part and en masse in exchange for both data and money.
• Kaggle allows companies to provide data to a community of data scientists who analyze the data to discover predictive, actionable insight and win incentive awards. Data and rewards are traded for innovation.

… Data markets are also changing attitudes about data as an asset that must be kept private. While some data will clearly always be proprietary, in many cases the largest amount of value will come from sharing data and getting some new type of value in return.

Key questions for new participants to data markets include:

• What is the value of your data inside your organization?
• What is the risk in sharing it?
• What control do you over the data?
• What can you get in exchange for it?
• What role should you play in data markets?

This will be useful!

Mozilla Launches Persona, A Login System That May Finally Replace Facebook Logins [Updates]

Do you hate websites that force you to login with Facebook or Twitter? Many sites resort to this option as the easiest way to integrate logins, despite that fact that most users don’t like it. Mozilla Persona can change this, and it’s now officially in public beta. Mozilla Persona, formerly known as BrowserID, is a centralized login option websites can implement that allows users to log in quickly, without compromising their Facebook or Twitter profiles.

… As a user, it takes several minutes to create a Persona account, which you can then theoretically use across the web to log in, if the website supports it. You can easily add several email addresses, but you have one password for all of them.

… If you want to implement Persona on your website, you can learn how to do so here.

Mozilla Persona is now in public beta, so you can try it out by creating your own account.