Would You Surrender Your Privacy for A Chocolate Bar?

How valuable is your online privacy? Would you pay for it? Or would you, like some research subjects, surrender your computer password in exchange for a chocolate bar or a cup of premium coffee? Tech critic Declan McCullagh used the occasion of Data Privacy Day 2010 to ponder these questions…

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Data Privacy Day, Education, and Action

Happy Data Privacy Day! Data Privacy Day (January 28, 2010) encourages a dialogue among businesses, individuals, government agencies, non-profit groups, academics, teachers and students about how advanced technologies affect our daily lives. This dialogue connects directly with ALA’s effort to spark a national conversation about privacy in America and we are pleased to recognize this event! It’s been a busy week in the realm of privacy and technology…

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Choose Privacy Week event in Boston

You’re invited! Help us launch Choose Privacy Week at a fun and exciting event, featuring Hal Niedzviecki, author of The Peep Diaries: How We’re Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbors. The event will take place during the ALA 2010 Midwinter Meeting from 4 – 5 p.m. on Saturday, January 16...

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• Digital Marketing, Privacy & the Public Interest



Protecting Privacy, Promoting Consumer Rights and Ensuring Corporate Accountability

 

Perhaps the most powerful - but largely invisible - force shaping our digital media reality is the role of interactive advertising and marketing. Much of our online experience, from websites to search engines to social networks, is being shaped to better serve advertisers. Increasingly, individuals are being electronically "shadowed" online, our actions and behaviors observed, collected, and analyzed so that we can be "micro-targeted." Now a $24 billion a year industry [2008 estimates] in the U.S., with expected dramatic growth to $80 billion or more by 2011, the goal of interactive marketing is to use the awesome power of new media to deeply engage you in what is being sold: whether it's a car, a vacation, a politician or a belief. An explosion of digital technologies, such as behavioral targeting and retargeting, "immersive" rich media, and virtual reality, are being utilized to drive the market goals of the largest brand advertisers and many others.

A major infrastructure has emerged to expand and promote the interests of this sector, including online advertising networks, digital marketing specialists, and trade lobbying groups.

The role which online marketing and advertising plays in shaping our new media world, including at the global level, will help determine what kind of society we will create.

• Will online advertising evolve so that everyone's privacy is truly protected?
• Will there be only a few gatekeepers determining what editorial content should be supported in order to better serve the interests of advertising, or will we see a vibrant commercial and non-commercial marketplace for news, information, and other content necessary for a civil society?
• Who will hold the online advertising industry accountable to the public, making its decisions transparent and part of the policy debate?
• Will the more harmful aspects of interactive marketing - such as threats to public health - be effectively addressed?

 

CDD's project works to keep the public informed and the online ad industry accountable.

Promoting Public Health in the Digital Era





The new media can be a boon to fostering healthy behaviors, including access to more information about drugs and lifestyle choices. But marketers also have the power to encourage the consumption of products and drugs that may be harmful to one's health. From investigating the online marketing of unhealthy food and beverages to children and teens to analyzing the threats from digital marketing of prescription and over-the-counter drugs, CDD is working to promote global public health.

(More - Digitalads.org)

 

Web 2.0 in the Public Interest





Today’s media system is not a top-down environment, but a “web 2.0” world where each of us can create the content and tell our own story. The key to cultivating this space, is to take our digital destiny into our own hands, by working together in communities across the country to help build a digital media system where democracy, fairness, creative opportunity and social justice are key measures for success.

The U.S. media system is undergoing a profound transformation as the Internet and other digital media reshape communications, commerce, community, and political power. Billions have been invested to build and define a system where the majority of global citizens will always be connected to interactive communications networks--via computers, cell phones, and other new devices. But will this world of broadband video, instant messaging, social networks, and video games give us a media system where the public interest is paramount?

In a way that traditional media was never able to, the powerful forces of interactive media can help our country address critical social issues such as:

• Economic opportunity for the poor and working middle class
• New approaches to solve the environmental crisis
• Divisions within the education and health care systems

   

If news, cultural and civic-oriented content came directly from the public—and not just a few private interests—then more accountability and responsibility would follow. By embracing Web 2.0 concepts and tools – starting with socially conscious social networks (SCSN) – greater democracy will be able to flourish under a brighter media future.

 

read more


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• Guardian column on LibDem proposal to block web-lockers

For my Guardian column today, I took the LibDem Lords to task for introducing legislation that would ban web-lockers because these services allow for copyright infringement. I won't argue that copyright infringement takes place on services like Google Docs and YouSendIt, but the reason that these services are great for piracy is that they're great [...]Read More »

• The Beginning of the End of Data Retention

Last week, the German Constitutional Court issued a much-anticipated decision, striking down its data retention law as violating human rights. It was an important victory for Europe’s Freedom Not Fear movement, which was formed to oppose the EU Data Retention Directive. But it was also a reminder of the political work which remains to be done to defeat it.

When the European Union first passed the Data Retention Directive in 2006, despite a hard-fought campaign by European activists, it seemed like the beginning of the end for Internet privacy. The directive sought to require telecommunications service providers operating in Europe to retain a detailed history of each of their customers' activity for up to 2 years for possible use by law enforcement; including phone calls made, web pages viewed, and emails sent and received.

The response from European citizens was swift and outraged. Under the banner of Freedom Not Fear, mass protests were held in cities all across Europe and beyond. The charge was led by the German Working Group on Data Retention (AK Vorrat), which in 2007 filed a class-action lawsuit of nearly 35,000 people challenging the German law.

The suit's complaints were mostly upheld by last week's German Constitutional Court decision. The court held that the blanket data retention mandated by the EU directive violated Article 10 of the German Constitution, which guarantees the basic right to private life and correspondence. The Court said that an infrastructure of exploratory surveillance results in an exceptional intensity of interference with human rights, which must be proportionately protected with appropriate safeguards. It also significantly narrowed the options for similar EU retention laws on other types of data. The court ordered the immediate deletion of all the data stored since the law went into effect in 2008 and ordered the suspension of data collection until a revised national law is proposed.

However, the court did choose to leave many important questions about the EU directive unanswered. In highlighting the need for increased safeguards, the court failed to recognize that the storage of data itself is what violates human rights. For instance, a survey of German citizens in 2008 found that 1 in 2 people would not have conversations with counselors or therapists by phone or email because of their concern about data retention.

A bolder stance was taken in October 2009 by the Romanian Constitutional Court, which ruled that the EU directive fundamentally violated Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees the right to respect for private life and correspondence. Data retention itself, the court wrote, is "likely to overturn the presumption of innocence and to transform a priori all users of electronic communication services or public communication networks into people suspected of committing terrorism crimes or other serious crimes." As a result, all citizens would become "permanent subjects to this intrusion into their exercise of their private rights to correspondence and freedom of expression."

The rulings in Romania and now Germany set the stage for an imminent series of decisions on the status of national data retention laws across Europe. The recent Bulgarian vote on data retention legislation met with sharp criticism and protests. Petitions against the Belgian data retention law are available in both French and Flemish. The constitutional challenge against the Retention of Data Bill brought by Digital Rights Ireland may be referred to the European Court of Human Rights. In the meantime, despite the fact that the European Commission won its lawsuit against the government of Sweden for failing to implement the directive, the minimal penalty turns out to be worth the political risk.

In order to overturn a directive, the European Commission, Parliament, and Council have to agree. Viviane Reding, the incoming European Commissioner for Justice, Fundamental Rights, and Citizenship, declared at her confirmation hearings her dedication to defending the right to privacy. The members of the European Parliament, inaugurating their new term, flexed their political muscle when they recently rejected assenting to the SWIFT agreement that would have enabled the wholesale transfer of Europeans' financial data to the US. The European Council, representing the ministries of the individual Member States, will respond to the political climate in their home countries.

All in all, the threats to privacy and free speech posed by the Data Retention Directive are on their way to being nullified. In Germany, AK Vorrat launched its campaign against the new law being devised and set its sights on ending data retention on the European level. They will need the help of citizens across Europe to raise awareness and speak out for their rights on national levels.

Freedom Not Fear is planning another series of protests later this year – stay tuned to Deeplinks or sign up for FNF's mailing list to find out what is being planned near you.


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• Massachusetts Data Protection Law Goes into Effect

Massachusetts’s new data protection law went into effect at the beginning of March. The law applies to all companies that own or license the personal information of Massachusetts residents. According to the new regulations, companies are now required to create a comprehensive security program that details how personal information will be safeguarded. Governor Deval Patrick stated, “Consumers should feel confident that their personal information is protected, and not exposed to loss or theft. These regulations improve the safety of personal information, while giving businesses the flexibility to secure that information without undue burden.” For more information on privacy and identity theft, see EPIC: Identity Theft.
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• Travelport becomes first CRS to claim it complies with EU privacy law

This week Travelport — the holding company that owns two of the big four Computerized Reservation Systems (CRSs) or Global Distribution Systems (GDSs) — announced that it has “certified” that it complies with “Safe Harbor” privacy and data protection principles for companies that want to be eligible to receive transfers to the US of personal [...]
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• The SeaWorld Killer Whale Death Video and the Right to Privacy

Yesterday, I reported on a lawsuit filed by the family of the SeaWorld trainer who was tragically killed during a show. The family does not want video taken of the incident released to the public, but Florida’s open records law would seem to require that they be made available. Today, Dan Solove blogs about [...]
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• Canadian Press: Privacy commissioner questions security of health records after doctors die

The Canadian Press reports on the issue of patients’ medical data privacy and security after the death or retirement of a doctor. Gary Dickson has seen abandoned medical records turn up in some pretty bizarre places in his time as Saskatchewan’s privacy commissioner – mouldy basements, drafty Quonset huts, vacant buildings. He argues that more needs to [...]
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• Marc Rotenberg on Google's Italian Privacy Case

Interesting commentary:

I don't think this is really a case about ISP liability at all. It is a case about the use of a person's image, without their consent, that generates commercial value for someone else. That is the essence of the Italian law at issue in this case. It is also how the right of privacy was first established in the United States.

The video at the center of this case was very popular in Italy and drove lots of users to the Google Video site. This boosted advertising and support for other Google services. As a consequence, Google actually had an incentive not to respond to the many requests it received before it actually took down the video.

Back in the U.S., here is the relevant history: after Brandeis and Warren published their famous article on the right to privacy in 1890, state courts struggled with its application. In a New York state case in 1902, a court rejected the newly proposed right. In a second case, a Georgia state court in 1905 endorsed it.

What is striking is that both cases involved the use of a person's image without their consent. In New York, it was a young girl, whose image was drawn and placed on an oatmeal box for advertising purposes. In Georgia, a man's image was placed in a newspaper, without his consent, to sell insurance.

Also important is the fact that the New York judge who rejected the privacy claim, suggested that the state assembly could simple pass a law to create the right. The New York legislature did exactly that and in 1903 New York enacted the first privacy law in the United States to protect a person's "name or likeness" for commercial use.

The whole thing is worth reading.



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• Obama Supports DNA Sampling Upon Arrest

Josh Gerstein over at Politico sent Threat Level his piece underscoring once again President Barack Obama is not the civil-liberties Knight In Shining Armor many were expecting. Gerstein posts a televised interview of Obama and John Walsh of America’s Most Wanted. The nation’s chief executive extols the virtues of mandatory DNA testing of Americans upon arrest, [...]
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