It's easy to be honest
when you know most people won't read it anyway...
Elizabeth Harrington
reports:
The
Kentucky Obamacare marketplace has no “expectation of privacy,”
warning its prospective customers that their information can be
monitored and shared with government bureaucrats.
When
clicking “let’s get started” on the state-run health insurance
marketplace “kynect,” the user is quickly prompted to a “WARNING
NOTICE.”
“This
is a government computer system and is the property of the
Commonwealth of Kentucky,” it states. “It is for authorized use
only regardless of time of day, location or method of access. “
“Users
(authorized or unauthorized) have no explicit or implicit expectation
of privacy,” the disclaimer reads. “Any or all uses of this
system and all files on the system may be intercepted, monitored,
recorded, copied, audited, inspected, and disclosed to authorized
state government and law enforcement personnel, as well as authorized
officials of other agencies, both domestic and foreign.”
Read more on the
Washington
Free Beacon. The state will be fixing/revising
that statement, it seems.
You don't often see
successful lawsuits arguing “management's failure to control their
data” I doubt they had any “procedure” to catch this. More
likely a tip from another employee...
Eric Roper reports:
An
insurance trust representing Minnesota counties has agreed to pay $2
million to settle a potential class action lawsuit over driver’s
license data snooping.
The
proposed settlement, presented Thursday in federal court, is the
largest payout so far over misuse of driver’s license files —
which has spurred a raft of lawsuits in recent months.
[...]
Thursday’s
case involved a child support officer in Rock County, Janet Patten,
who allegedly made more than 4,000 photo queries
of the Driver and Vehicle Services (DVS) database in 2010 and 2011.
Patten was fired and several law firms sued on behalf of about 3,000
people who received data breach letters.
“She
looked up friends and neighbors and co-workers and workers in other
counties,” Rock County Administrator Kyle Oldre said last year.
“It was just people she knew. And she spent a ton of time doing
it.”
A
criminal investigation did not turn up any nefarious intent.
Read more on the Star
Tribune.
More interesting than
it seems at first glance?
Three
Paradoxes of Big Data
Three
Paradoxes of Big Data by Neil
Richards (Washington University in Saint Louis – School of Law)
and Jonathan
King (Washington University in Saint Louis)
“Big
data is all the rage. Its proponents tout
the use of sophisticated analytics to mine large data sets for
insight as the solution to many of our society’s problems. These
big data evangelists insist that data-driven decision making can now
give us better predictions in areas ranging from college admissions
to dating to hiring to medicine to national security and crime
prevention. But much of the rhetoric of big data contains no
meaningful analysis of its potential perils, only the promise. We
don’t deny that big data holds substantial potential for the
future, and that large dataset analysis has important uses today.
But we would like to sound a cautionary note and pause to consider
big data’s potential more critically. In particular, we
want to highlight three paradoxes in the
current rhetoric about big data to help move us toward a more
complete understanding of the big data picture.
First,
while big data pervasively collects all manner of private
information, the operations of big data itself are almost entirely
shrouded in legal and commercial secrecy. We call this the
Transparency Paradox.
[How we do it is rather dull, but hardly
proprietary (the results are) Bob]
Second,
though big data evangelists talk in terms of miraculous outcomes,
this rhetoric ignores the fact that big data seeks to identify at the
expense of individual and collective identity. We call this the
Identity Paradox.
[You do not need to “identify” at the
level of a full dossier. However it is very useful to be able to
connect the actions of a website visitor (for example) with a visitor
from last week. Bob]
And
third, the rhetoric of big data is characterized by its power to
transform society, but big data has power effects of its own, which
privilege large government and corporate entities at the expense of
ordinary individuals. We call this the Power
Paradox. [Few
individuals have Big Data. Bob]
Recognizing
the paradoxes of big data, which show its perils alongside its
potential, will help us to better understand this revolution. It may
also allow us to craft solutions to produce a revolution that will be
as good as its evangelists predict.“
I wonder if my students
would be interested in a takeover?
Limping
BlackBerry makes buyout overtures to Google, others -- report
For my programming
students... New, but growing fast.
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/runnable-wants-to-be-the-youtube-for-code-with-a-searchable-repository/
Runnable
Wants To Be The YouTube For Code With A Searchable Repository
Runnable
aims to be a huge library of code anyone can search for code snippets
and then reuse. For all practical purposes, they want to be the
“YouTube of Code”. Searching for code has become a Web activity
now for many developers as they look to fast track development with
re-usable bits of code, instead of going through the process of doing
it from scratch and wasting precious time. Runnable wants to make it
easier to search for those bits of code and fit them together quickly
in any developmental project.
… There are
presently 1,000 snippets of code and the index will grow as the site
moves ahead. The uniqueness of Runnable is that you
can edit and test the code on the site itself in a
sandboxed environment. You can also upload your own
code and share it with the wider community.
… other searchable
code repositories.
No comments:
Post a Comment