What? You expect government to do its job? How
silly of you! On the other hand, I’m not sure this would have
changed anything.
Commentary
– How the FTC Could Have Prevented the Facebook Mess
Techonomy
Exclusive – Marc Rotenberg: “Here comes an understatement:
Facebook’s failure to protect user data was well known before the
company suspended dealings with Cambridge Analytica last week. What
is not well known is that the transfer of 50 million user records to
the controversial data mining and political consulting firm could
have been avoided if the Federal Trade Commission had done its job.
The FTC issued a 2011
consent order against Facebook to protect the privacy of user data.
If it had been enforced, there would be no story.
Facebook bears responsibility too, because it actively worked to
avoid compliance. Perhaps if the government and company had done
their jobs, we would have seen a different outcome in the 2016
election. [Wow! That’s a
reach. Bob] Back in 2009, the Electronic Privacy
Information Center (EPIC), which I head, and a coalition of consumer
organizations filed a complaint
with the Federal Trade Commission. It alleged that Facebook was
overriding user settings and allowing third parties to obtain users’
private information without their consent. We had conducted
extensive research, documented the problem of Facebook’s changing
privacy settings, and turned to the FTC to seek a legal order. The
Federal Trade Commission launched an investigation, and in a
comprehensive
settlement with the
company in 2011, made clear that it agreed with us. As the FTC
said at the time, “Facebook changed its website so certain
information that users may have designated as private – such as
their Friends List – was made public. They didn’t warn users
that this change was coming or get their approval in advance.”
Also, from the 2011 settlement: “Facebook represented that
third-party apps that users installed would have access only to user
information that they needed to operate. In fact, the apps could
access nearly all of users’ personal data – data the apps didn’t
need.” Much of this was in our original complaint…”
(Related) Was Facebook ignorant or did they think
no one would notice?
South Korea
fines Facebook $369K for slowing user internet connections
… The Korea Communications Commission (KCC)
began investigating Facebook last May and found that the company had
illegally limited user access, as reported by ABC
News. Local South Korean laws prohibit internet services from
rerouting users’ connections to networks in Hong Kong and US
instead of local ISPs without notifying those users. In a few cases,
such rerouting slowed down users’ connections by as much as 4.5
times.
… “Facebook did not
actively look into the complaints from local telecoms service
providers that users are complaining about slower connections and, as
a result, its service quality was not maintained at an appropriate
level,” KCC said in a statement, adding that Facebook restored
connections last autumn after its rerouting methods became public
knowledge in South Korea.
Toward a complete “citizen dossier?”
Shoshanna Solomon reports:
The Israeli government on Sunday approved a National Digital Health plan, which, despite mounting privacy concerns, plans to create a digital database of the medical files of some 9 million residents and make them available to researchers and enterprises.
The government has vowed to protect the privacy of individuals and is touting the NIS 1 billion ($287 million) program as a huge boon to the medical research industry. But critics pointed to risks of a massive breach in patient confidentiality and urged the government to slow down.
Read more on Times
of Israel. This is intended to be a major boost to the Israel
economy.
Given that a database with almost the entire
population’s details (the Agron Program) had been compromised
years ago and was
shared, is it only a matter of time until this database can be
linked to the other one? Even if this new one requires consent, I
can see why people have concerns about privacy issues.
We haven’t heard from Kim in a while. I think
he may be a bit optimistic thinking his extradition worries are over,
but clearly he was right about the violation of his rights. I doubt
they’ll give back everything they took from him. (The Crown was
ordered to pay him only $90,000 in damages.)
Newshub reports:
The Human Rights Tribunal has ruled that the Attorney-General broke the law by withholding information from Kim Dotcom, which he says means his extradition case is “over”.
In July 2015, Mr Dotcom sent an urgent information privacy request to all 28 Ministers of the Crown as well as almost all Government departments, asking for personal information they had on him, including under his previous names.
Read more on Newshub.
Dotcom then called for the resignation of the Privacy Commissioner
of New Zealand:
I call for the
immediate resignation of the Privacy Commissioner of New Zealand for
his complicity with the former Attorney General and Crown Law in
unlawfully withholding information that New Zealanders were legally
entitled to.
You never know when you might want to quote one of
these.
Historical
Supreme Court Cases Now Online on loc.gov
Historical
Supreme Court Cases Now Online – More Than 35,000 Decisions Now
Available, Searchable on loc.gov: “More than 225 years of
Supreme Court decisions acquired by the Library of Congress are now
publicly available online – free
to access in a page image format for the first time. The
Library has made available more than 35,000 cases that were published
in the printed bound editions of United States Reports (U.S.
Reports). United States Reports is a series of bound case reporters
that are the official reports of decisions for the United States
Supreme Court dating to the court’s first decision in 1791 and
to earlier courts that preceded the Supreme Court in the colonial
era. The Library’s new online collection offers access
to individual cases published in volumes 1-542 of the bound edition.
This collection of Supreme Court cases is fully searchable. Filters
allow users to narrow their searches by date, name of the justice
authoring the opinion, subject and by the main legal concepts at
issue in each case. PDF versions of individual cases can be viewed
and downloaded. The collection is online at
loc.gov/collections/united-states-reports/.
… The
acquisition is part of the Law Library’s transition to a digital
future and in support of its efforts to make historical U.S. public
domain legal materials freely and easily available to Congress and
the world. Users can access this collection from a link
on loc.gov
and law.gov.
More recent editions of the U.S. Reports from 1987 to the present
are available online from the U.S. Supreme Court.”
For the correlation lecture in my next Statistic
class.
Research –
The surprising link between your birthday and place of birth in one
heat map
Data
Driven Journalism: “…Take a look at [the heat map in this
article], created by the team at Visme.
Based on the most
recent UN data on live births, it clearly shows that there is a
rather surprising and unexpected correlation between three different
variables: the top birth months, seasons of the year and the latitude
of the country (distance from the equator)… After looking at this
data visualization carefully, did you notice that the top birth
months for most northern hemisphere countries are July, August and
September? And did you notice that the lower you go down the list,
the farther right the top birth months appear, eventually spilling
over into the first months of the year? While the majority of the
middle-latitude (or tropical) countries register September and
October as their top birth months, Southern hemisphere countries such
as Uruguay register their top birth months at the start of the year…”
[Facebook may already know all this, but….]
No comments:
Post a Comment