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Rina Steenkamp - Privacy and technology
A publication by the Council of the European Union.
From the news release:
"Today, Ministers in the Justice Council have sealed a general approach on the Commission proposal on the Data Protection Regulation. Modern, harmonised data protection rules will contribute to making Europe fit for the digital age and are a step forward to the EU Digital Single Market. Trilogue negotiations with the Parliament and the Council will start in June; the shared ambition is to reach a final agreement by the end of 2015."
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A resource page by Carlo Piltz (De Lege Data).
From the introduction:
"The purpose of this site is to gather and list the relevant official documents which have been published in the context of the reform process of European data protection law, particularly the proposal for a General Data Protection Regulation (#EUDataP on Twitter). This site will only contain links to documents published by and publicly accessible through the websites of European institutions (no 'leaked' documents)."
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A publication by Hogan Lovells.
From 'The time has come':
"It's been a long way and the task is not over yet. However, there is light at the end of the EU data protection reform tunnel. The modernisation of European privacy laws has reached a critical milestone and we can now safely assume that this process will culminate in a radical new framework in a matter of months. [...] Businesses operating in Europe or targeting European customers need to get their act together and start preparing for the new regime. At stake are not only the consequences of non-compliance, but also the ability to take advantage of new technologies, data analytics and the immense value of personal information. From determining when European law applies to devising a workable cooperation strategy with national regulators, there are many intricate novelties to understand and address. Our guide 'Future-proofing privacy' aims to be a useful starting point."
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A study by Jos Dumortier and Eleni Kosta (European Commission).
From the overview page:
"The study examines whether the ePrivacy Directive has achieved its intended effects and puts forward recommendations for future revision. It does so on the basis of evidence on the transposition of the ePrivacy Directive in the Member States and of an in depth analysis of the implementation and enforcement of key provisions. The study also assesses how the ePrivacy Directive and the proposed Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will operate together."
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A report by David Anderson Q.C., Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation.
From 'Is privacy dead?'
"2.44. Recent changes in privacy norms are not without relevance: they may for example have a bearing on whether there is a reasonable expectation of privacy in a particular type of data at a particular time. They do not however amount to any sort of argument for dispensing with constraints on the government's collection or use of data. Indeed as more of our lives are lived online, and as more and more personal information can be deduced from our electronic footprint, the arguments for strict legal controls on the power of the state become if anything more compelling."
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EFF's annual report on online service providers' privacy and transparency practices regarding government access to user data, by Nate Cardozo, Kurt Opsahl and Rainey Reitman (EFF).
From the Executive Summary:
"While our daily lives have upgraded to the 21st century, the law hasn't kept pace. To date, the U.S. Congress hasn't managed to update the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act to acknowledge that email stored more than 6 months deserves identical protections to email stored less than 6 months. Congress also dragged its feet on halting the NSA's indiscriminate surveillance of online communications and has yet to enact the strong reforms we deserve. Congress is even on the precipice of making things far worse, considering proposals that would mandate government backdoors into the technology we rely on to digitally communicate. In this climate, we increasingly look to technology companies themselves to have the strongest possible policies when it comes to protecting user rights. Which companies will stand by users, insisting on transparency and strong legal standards around government access to user data? And which companies make those policies public, letting the world - and their own users - judge their stances on standing up for privacy rights?"
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A publication by the Department of Homeland Security.
Abstract:
"The Centralized Hostile Intent (CHI) program within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) collects video images of trained actors posing as passengers, as well as members of the traveling public at the Theodore Francis Green Memorial State Airport in Providence, Rhode Island. The Centralized Hostile Intent program goals are to assess whether behavioral indicators of malicious intent can be observed by trained professionals (e.g., TSA Behavior Detection Officers) from video images in a remote environment. Remote screening offers the potential for the Transportation Security Agency (TSA) to expand the scale of its behavior detection program without correspondingly increasing staffing costs. The data collection involves collection of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) in the form of video images that include the face and body of trained actors and members of the traveling public. This Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) addresses privacy issues associated with the collection of the video data for the Centralized Hostile Intent (CHI) program and updates the previously published PIA for 'Project Hostile Intent Technology.'"
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A publication by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC).
From 'I. Introduction':
"This complaint concerns proposed changes in the business practices of Uber, the largest 'ridesharing' service in the United States. In less than four weeks, Uber will claim the right to collect personal contact information and detailed location data of American consumers, even when they are not using the service. These changes ignore the FTC's prior decisions, threaten the privacy rights and personal safety of American consumers, ignore past bad practices of the company involving the misuse of location data, pose a direct risk of consumer harm, and constitute an unfair and deceptive trade practice subject to investigation by the Federal Trade Commission."
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An article by Kirsten E. Martin.
Abstract:
"Big Data combines information from diverse sources to create knowledge, make better predictions and tailor services. This article analyzes Big Data as an industry, not a technology, and identifies the ethical issues it faces. These issues arise from reselling consumers' data to the secondary market for Big Data. Remedies for the issues are proposed, with the goal of fostering a sustainable Big Data Industry."
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An article by Ning Zhang, Manohar Pulari, Yaniv Taigman, Rob Fergus and Lubomir Bourdev.
Abstract:
"We explore the task of recognizing peoples' identities in photo albums in an unconstrained setting. To facilitate this, we introduce the new People In Photo Albums (PIPA) dataset, consisting of over 60000 instances of 2000 individuals collected from public Flickr photo albums. With only about half of the person images containing a frontal face, the recognition task is very challenging due to the large variations in pose, clothing, camera viewpoint, image resolution and illumination. We propose the Pose Invariant PErson Recognition (PIPER) method, which accumulates the cues of poselet-level person recognizers trained by deep convolutional networks to discount for the pose variations, combined with a face recognizer and a global recognizer. Experiments on three different settings confirm that in our unconstrained setup PIPER significantly improves on the performance of DeepFace, which is one of the best face recognizers as measured on the LFW dataset."
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A document by Disconnect, Inc..
From the introduction to the complaint:
"When a consumer uses his Android mobile phone to read the Financial Times' story about the Commission's SO against Google, he unknowingly receives 17 “network requests” from sites and services other than the FT, all attempting to open invisible connections to his device. Seven of these requests – including three from Google itself – come from problematic sites and services that invisibly track the user in order to make a comprehensive profile of his personal information as he uses applications and browses the web. This tracking not only violates personal privacy, but also leaves users vulnerable to malware and identity theft."
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An Opinion by the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS).
From the Executive Summary:
"The development of mHealth has great potential for improving healthcare and the lives of individuals. In addition, Big Data, together with the 'Internet of Things' is expected to have a significant impact on mHealth because of the volume of information available and the quality of inferences that may be drawn from such information. It is expected to provide new insights for medical research and it might also reduce costs and simplify patient´s recourse to healthcare. At the same time, it is necessary to protect individuals' dignity and fundamental rights, particularly those of privacy and data protection. The wide use of Big Data can reduce users´ control over their personal information. This is partly due to the huge unbalance between the limited information available to people and the extensive information available to entities which offer products involving the processing of this personal information."
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A report by Dipl.-Inform. Eric Clausing, Michael Schiefer M.Sc., Ulf Lösche and Dipl. Ing. Maik Morgenstern (AV-Test).
From the news release:
"Fitness wristbands save and transmit the wearer's data directly to the smartphone, then normally without any detours directly into the cloud. Is this secure? Is it possible for everyone to see, manipulate or even exploit the data? AV-TEST examined 9 fitness wristbands and urgently recommends to certain manufacturers that they revamp their security policies."
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An article by Lorna Woods (EU Law Analysis).
From the article:
"When can freedom of expression online be curtailed? The recent judgment of the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights in Delfi v. Estonia has addressed this issue, in the particular context of comments made upon a news article. This ruling raises interesting questions of both human rights and EU law, and I will examine both in turn."
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