US outlines privacy safeguards â and reveals plans to mine personal data
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'Invasive and unprecedented' The US Government signalled some willingness this week to address concerns over citizens' privacy, but also launched a scheme which will analyse secret airline passenger risk profiles and keep them for 40 years.â¦
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The United States plans to issue passports with personal data stored on radio frequency identification chips. The documents would be harder to forge, but might leave holders vulnerable to identity theft. By Ryan Singel.
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(InfoWorld) - Search giant Google will propose on Friday that governments and technology companies create a transnational privacy policy to address growing concerns over how personal data is handled across the Internet. Google's global privacy counsel, Peter Fleischer, will make the proposal at a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization meeting in Strasbourg, France, dealing with the intersection of technology with human rights and ethics. Fleischer's 30-minute presentation will advocate that regulators, international organizations, and private companies increase dialog on privacy issues with a goal to create a unified standard. Google envisions the policy to be a product of self-regulation by companies, improved laws, and possible new ones, according to a Google spokesman based in London. "We donât want to be prescriptive about who does that and what those standards are because it should be a collaborative effort," the spokesman said. Other organizations have already made progress on privacy standards, he said. For example, Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) created a nine-pointÂ Privacy FrameworkÂ designed to aid countries without existing policies. However, the framework has been criticized for vagueness and only been partially implemented by APEC members, said David Bradshaw, principal analyst at Ovum. E.U. privacy regulations are already more stringent than the APEC's recommendations, which highlights the difficulty in creating a global standard that meets existing regulatory requirements in various geographic areas, he said. "From Google's viewpoint, they can't expect the E.U. and those nations that have higher privacy standards to level down to the APEC standards," Bradshaw said. Google's increasing power in search, Internet commerce and software services hasÂ place its privacy policies under scrutiny. In June, Google said it would delete the data it stores about end-users anonymous in its server logs after 18 months, part of an effort toÂ deflate concerns about privacyÂ raised by a European Union (E.U.) working group composed of data protection officials from 27 countries. Google took a further battering after itÂ acquired DoubleClick, an online advertising company that uses technology to track user trends in order to serve them targeted ads. The technology, also used by many other Internet advertising companies, has raised privacy concerns. A European consumer group, Bureau EuropÃ©en des Unions de Consommateurs asked the European Commission in July as well as other authorities to investigateÂ how the DoubleClick deal would impact consumers. The focus on privacy by governments and individual Internet users has resulted in localized legislation, causing a fragmentation in privacy regulations, Google's spokesman said. That can make it difficult for e-commerce businesses, as an increasing amount of data is routinely crossing international borders through credit card transactions, he said. "We really hope that this sparks a sustained, thoughtful creative debate, he said. Â
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New bills introduced in Congress this week target the privacy fallout from data breaches as well as the problems of pretexting and spyware.
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Company's upgrades will put a particular focus on protecting personal information from online thieves.
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IP addresses, a string of numbers that identifies a computer, should generally be regarded as personal information, the head of the European Union's group of data privacy regulators said Monday.
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Tories warn of "state snooping'' as greater sharing of private data between Whitehall departments is planned.
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The FBI wants to compile a massive computer database and analyze it for clues to unmask terrorist sleeper cells. Two congressmen are worried about whether the bureau will protect the privacy of U.S. citizens.
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Microsoft Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. and other high-tech companies are preparing to push for data-privacy legislation next year to replace what they consider an outdated patchwork of state and federal laws that are inconsistent and burdensome.
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Strict safeguards will prevent the world's biggest biometric database from being abused, US authorities say.
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What exactly does the law mean by "data quality," and what does it have to do with privacy?
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Google Inc , the world's  largest Internet company, will propose at a meeting of European  policymakers in France on Friday that national regulators agree  on a basic set of global privacy protections.
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Ministers face calls to bring in safeguards to protect people's privacy against the police DNA database.
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European Union citizens will be protected by the U.S. Privacy Act under an anti-terror deal with Washington on the sharing of trans-Atlantic air passenger data, the EU's top justice official said Monday.
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The European Union tackles the prospect of data-privacy breaches years ago; what's America bringing to the table now that Congress is taking the matter seriously? Patrick Lamphere analyzes where things are headed.
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Department of Homeland Security implements data-mining system for passengers traveling to the U.S.
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The United States wants recruit Britain and other countries to share biometric data on terrorists and criminals, a British newspaper reported Tuesday.