Gates calls for new privacy law
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates asked the U.S. Congress to pass a comprehensive privacy law this year, allowing consumers to control how their personal information is used. Gates repeated past Microsoft calls for a wide-ranging privacy law during a speech at advocacy group the Center for Democracy and Technology's (CDT) annual gala dinner Wednesday. A comprehensive privacy bill should allow consumers to control their personal data, should provide transparency about what their data is used for, and should notify them when their data has been compromised, Gates said. Gates said he believes the U.S. can achieve a balance between privacy and protecting the country against terrorists and other criminals. But the balance will not be an easy one to create, Gates said. While many U.S. residents would say they want as much privacy "as possible," law enforcement needs to be able to track criminals, Gates said. "These privacy issues are not as easy as you might think," he told the crowd. Gates hinted that some privacy protections can go so far that they become annoying to consumers. He talked about the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), passed by Congress in 1996, which puts strict controls on the release of information. HIPAA too often asks patients to sign documents allowing the release of their medical records, he said. HIPAA is evidence "we don't always get it right the first time," Gates said. "All I know is I keep signing those forms." Another balance Congress needs to strike is between emerging technologies and privacy, said Senator Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Leahy also called on Congress to pass a privacy law. But a privacy law cannot restrict new technologies, Leahy said. "I don't want to stop the technologies, I want to protect our privacy," he during the gala dinner. "I think we can do both." The U.S. government spying on its residents is of particular concern, Leahy said. "I don't want to put a brake on technology, but on what my government can learn about me without letting me know," he said. Leahy and Gates both said they have great hopes for the future of the Internet. "The Internet is a great tool," Leahy said. "Let's keep it a free tool." The world is just at the beginning of the potential of the Internet coupled with personal computers, Gates added. Coming advances in storage, in bandwidth and in user-created content will make the Internet and even greater tool for democratic ideals, he said. "We're just at the very beginning," he said.
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Cutting-edge data mining and other intelligence tools could redefine privacy as we know it. A News.com special report.
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Biometric and smart-card technology will replace passwords to verify ID, Microsoft head Bill Gates says. Again.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft is joining Ask.com in offering Web surfers a way to use its search engines anonymously, and the two companies are now calling on the search and online advertising industry to develop a common set of privacy practices. By year's end, Microsoft will give users a way to search anonymously on its Microsoft Windows Live Web sites, and it will also implement a new data retention policy that after 18 months will scrub all search query data of any information that could be used to identify the searcher. "We think that we as an industry ought to take a look at ways to further enhance privacy protections," said Microsoft Chief Privacy Strategist Peter Cullen. "We're really trying to make sure that people always have the ability to have a trusted experience." These steps areÂ similar to those taken by Ask.comÂ last week and are part of an effort to create industry consensus on privacy practices, Cullen said. When visitors use Microsoft's Windows Live search engine, Microsoft stores the search queries along with some information on the person doing the searching in order to provide them with targeted advertising. Like all the major search providers, Microsoft doesn't associate names or e-mail addresses with this data, but it does keep IP (Internet Protocol) addresses and some other identifying information, such as the zip codes of Windows Live users. Privacy advocates are concerned that this data could be misused. "Search terms are often about drugs, they're about sex and they're about rock and roll," said Peter Swire, a law professor with Ohio State University who was the White House's Chief Counselor for Privacy under the Clinton administration. "There are a lot of people who are feeling that they're doing a private exploration and wouldn't want their search terms as part of their permanent record." Last year, AOLÂ researchers inadvertently illustrated how this data could be misused when theyÂ posted data on about 650,000 searchesÂ made on the company's Web site. New York Times reporters were able to track down one of the searchers based on the information in the database. Ask.com and Microsoft's announcements put pressure on Google to improve its privacy practices, Swire said. Google retains part of the IP address associated with searches and has not promised to provide anonymous searching, he explained. It is becoming even more important for companies to safeguard consumers' privacy as the online advertising and search industries consolidate, Swire said. Both Microsoft and Google have made major moves in this space over the past few months with their plannedÂ acquisitions of aQuantiveÂ andÂ DoubleClick. More pressure is coming from the European Union, which has placed limits on the amount of time search companies can retain this type of data and isÂ reviewing Google's DoubleClick acquisition. Microsoft and Ask.com will invite privacy advocates and Internet search and advertising companies such as Google, AOL, and Yahoo to come together and more clearly explain how the industry will handle privacy. "The first step is, we'll be in contact with all the other players in this space and talk about what a summit might look like," said Cullen. "We're very happy to host it, if that's the answer ... both Microsoft and Ask.com think that this is the time to make this happen." The two companies expect to report on the results of this outreach by September. That's right around the time that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is expected to host a workshop discussing these same issues, Swire said. "Now we're getting public debate and corporate debate on best practices. And the FTC will be trying to push that this fall." Â
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Group seeks changes for more privacy during Web searches, like using an opt-in cookie instead of opt-out.
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U.S. officials said they would unveil on Friday reasonable and inexpensive national requirements to implement an identification-card program critics call a costly invasion of privacy.
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Google is proposing that governments and technology companies create a transnational privacy policy.
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The site tweaks a privacy setting that had revealed personal information from private profiles after a Wired News inquiry, and explains its philosophy on users' privacy. Threat Level talks with chief privacy officer, Chris Kelly.
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The Bush administration's new privacy guidelines fail to protect the rights of Americans, and the board created to guarantee those rights lacks the independence to do the job, civil libertarians told the White House privacy board yesterday at its first public forum.
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Privacy advocates say new passports that carry information in a computer chip will be vulnerable to electronic snooping.
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At a hearing Monday, a top European regulator said that Internet Protocol addresses should be treated as personal information, something Google and other sites have resisted.
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Google, a frequent target of privacy advocates, yesterday called for new international standards on the collection and use of consumer data.
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Privacy to be central to lawmaker hearings in Europe on Google's proposed $3.1 billion acquisition of the online-ad company.
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A new feature called AskEraser will let users perform anonymous searches.
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Shouldn't be added as an afterthought Government needs to make privacy and data protection principles a core component of its IT specifications, according to the assistant information commissioner.â¦
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Companies brace for privacy debate as potentially intrusive applications arrive faster than expected.
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National regulators need to agree on a  basic set of global privacy protections for the Internet within  the next five years, a senior official with web searcher Google   said on Monday.