How
far does “Know thy customer” extend?
Wendy
Davis reports:
Maine’s new broadband privacy law is “an extreme outlier,” industry lobbying groups are telling a federal judge.
The law, slated for enforcement in August, requires internet service providers to obtain customers’ opt-in consent before using web-browsing data for ad targeting.
A coalition of broadband lobbying groups sued in February to block the law, arguing that it violates carriers’ First Amendment rights by restricting their ability to use information about customers.
Read
more on MediaPost.
This
may apply more widely than Covid…
Coronavirus
recovery – data protection advice for organisations
As
one of the few people in the entire world (my students tell me) who
does not own a smartphone, I would pass invisibly through the
geofence dragnet.
Google’s
Geofence Warrants Face a Major Legal Challenge
… Unlike
a traditional search order that identifies a particular suspect,
geofence warrants require Google to trawl its massive library of
location data, commonly known as the “Sensorvault,” to identify
people who were in the area when a crime was committed. They are
relatively new, and increasingly widespread: Between 2017 and 2018,
Google saw a 1,500% surge in the number of requests it received, and
from 2018 to 2019, the rate increased over 500%.
… But
in the process of pinpointing anyone who may have been near the scene
of a crime, geofence warrants have also pointed police toward people
like Jorge Molina, a warehouse worker in Arizona who was arrested as
a murder suspect after police obtained data showing his phone at the
crime scene. Molina spent nearly a week in jail before being found
innocent. Which is why, as the prevalence of geofence warrants has
increased, so has the alarm of defense lawyers, privacy advocates,
and civil rights groups, who point to a lack of federal oversight
that has left Google to serve as gatekeeper of a legal process they
believe, at its core, violates the Constitution.
… “Geofence
warrants like the one in this case are incapable of satisfying the
probable cause and particularity requirements, making them
unconstitutional general warrants,” the lawyers argued in a motion
to suppress evidence.
The brief goes on to describe them as “the digital equivalent
of
searching bags of every person walking along Broadway because of a
theft in Times Square.”
Does
this indicate a broader change? Let’s hope so!
MIT,
guided by open access principles, ends Elsevier negotiations
MIT
News:
“Standing by its commitment to provide equitable and open access
to scholarship, MIT has ended negotiations with Elsevier for a new
journals contract. Elsevier was not able to present a proposal that
aligned with the principles of the MIT
Framework for Publisher Contracts.
Developed by the MIT Libraries in collaboration with the Ad
Hoc Task Force on Open Access to MIT’s Research and
the Committee
on the Library System in
October 2019, the MIT Framework is grounded in the conviction that
openly sharing research and educational materials is key to the
Institute’s mission of advancing knowledge and bringing that
knowledge to bear on the world’s greatest challenges. It affirms
the
overarching principle that control of scholarship and its
dissemination should reside with scholars and their institutions,
and aims to ensure that scholarly research outputs are openly and
equitably available to the broadest possible audience, while also
providing valued services to the MIT community…More than 100
institutions, ranging from multi-institution consortia to large
research universities to liberal arts colleges, decided to endorse
the MIT Framework in recognition of its potential to advance open
scholarship and the public good…”
Perspective.
Can we compare the war on Covid to the ramp up of industries after
Pearl Harbor?
Rumors,
death, and a tech overhaul: Inside Amazon’s race to hire 175,000
workers during a pandemic
The
rollout of virtual hiring and onboarding was at least two years away.
Covid-19 changed everything.
In
the first quarter of 2020, the e-commerce giant’s net sales
increased by 26%
over
the same period a year earlier. It was panic-buying on a grand
scale. Amazon.com search
rankings from
mid-March awarded top billing to toilet paper, hand sanitizer, and
Clorox wipes, but shelter-in-place orders and social distancing meant
online shopping was now the
way to buy almost anything. Over the next two months, the company
determined, it would need to add 175,000 people—a bit less than the
entire population of Providence, Rhode Island—to its workforce.
But in order to do it, Amazon would need to convert almost completely
to virtual hiring and training.
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