UK.gov not ready to share on data sharing
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Should they call it something else? Six months after the government announced it would review whether data protection laws were a "barrier" to its information sharing plans, it is still not ready to share its views on the matter.â¦
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European council dilutes data proposals to taste European privacy wonks have become alarmed over the degeneration of policy talks on the protection of people who become the subject of police database cross-border pollinations.â¦
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Company: "It's not supposed to be possible to transfer a domain name from one registrar to another without notifying both the current registrar and the current domain owner, and yet it happened anyway."
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Don't trust NHS IT British doctors are almost unanimous in not trusting the government to adequately secure patients' medical records.â¦
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Juniors kept in dark, then hung out to dry? Yes Minister HMRC restricted details of its security procedures to senior officials, it has emerged, just weeks after the department pilloried a junior official for loading the UKâs child benefit database onto CDs which were then lost.â¦
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High-tech companies are working with the U.S. government to develop a secure data-sharing system.
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Dry run on immigration databases UK and US immigration databases have been linked in an intelligence sharing experiment that could lead to permanent trans-Atlantic data stores of wanted and suspected people.â¦
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Yeah, but no, but yeah.. The UK government has made a statement offering cautious and qualified support for the adoption of open standards for government documents, but warns that there is no such thing as a document storage panacea.â¦
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Propose switch to decentralised, interoperable databases The Tory party has put forward a rescue plan for the NHS IT system in the wake of the latest government data losses, which were revealed over the weekend. Nine English NHS trusts have owned up to large scale losses of personal data, and although in most cases the nature of this data has yet to be revealed, City &amp; Hackney Primary Care Trust reportedly mislaid the names and addresses of 160,000 children.â¦
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UK lays down...proposals The UK has proposed a transatlantic arrangement for sharing biometric data about travellers as US coalition countries in the "war on terror" push for a global system to control migration.â¦
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Bracknell Forest head lobbies for data sharing incentive The leader of Bracknell Forest BC has suggested people who allow their data to be sold to marketing firms could receive council tax cuts.â¦
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Social services and ContactPoint included A document produced for London NHS reveals plans for extensive sharing of personal data between the NHS, social services, education and the police. Obtained by William Heath's Ideal Government blog, it says that the "Health and Social Care Integration Project" should fit with "known and future national developments... e.g. ContactPoint for Children, the Common Assessment Framework for Children, the Care Programme Approach, the Single Assessment Process for Older People, the Proposed Common Assessment Framework for Adults and its link with the NHS Connecting for Health National e-SAP Project.â¦
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It&#39;s hard to argue against data portability. After all, who could oppose giving people control over the data they load, publish, and store on Web sites?This is particularly timely now that average users have started feeling the &quot;network fatigue&quot; that comes from maintaining multiple social-networking profiles, e-mail accounts, blogs, address book applications, social-news-sites memberships, and the like.And yet, while it is an important and unquestionably worthy endeavor, data portability faces thorny challenges in such areas as technology, privacy, security, business, and regulation and legislation.An informed and articulate discussion of these challenges can be found on the online forum of the DataPortability Workgroup, an organization founded recently to highlight the work that multiple data portability groups have been doing and to create a technical blueprint for vendors to adopt.While the workgroup has about 50 formal members, anyone can join the discussion forum, which now has more than 700 participants and is the workgroup&#39;s main meeting place.Activity on the forum has been engaging in recent weeks as people discuss technical and nontechnical issues, offer up suggestions, ask questions, argue and, mostly, cheer each other on in their collective quest for a satisfactory data portability solution.More than 400 discussion threads have been started, as participants ponder what are the parameters for user data, what data portability truly means, who owns data already created for a specific site, and whether making data portable is illegal in Europe.Other threads focus on how to bring together various data portability efforts already under way, like the Friend of a Friend project (FOAF), OpenID , Attention Profiling Mark-up Language (APML), the Liberty Alliance, and various open data microformats.Despite the magnitude of the endeavor, participants interviewed feel optimistic that the workgroup will yield concrete results that will bring about industry-wide implementations of data portability solutions.&quot;Where there is a will, there&#39;s a way. And so far it seems like everyone has thrown their will behind the project. Now they need to find a way,&quot; said Chris Saad, cofounder of the DataPortability Workgroup.The DataPortability Workgroup positions itself at a higher conceptual level than the groups working to develop specific technical standards for data portability.&quot;Our goal is to highlight, not compete [with], the work of other groups and to encourage the adoption of their work with vendors and users,&quot; Saad said.The workgroup&#39;s main accomplishment so far, Saad said, is that it brought people to the table and started to outline the documents it plans to deliver, chief among which will be the DataPortability Technical Blueprint, envisioned as a key reference document for a complete implementation architecture for the data portability stack of standards.John Breslin is a workgroup supporter who sees it as having a lot of synergy with the Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities Project (SIOC), which he founded in 2004 to provide methods for interconnecting discussion services such as blogs, forums, and mailing lists to each other.&quot;SIOC is a data format essentially to describe communities. It has many different possible applications, of which data portability is one,&quot; Breslin, a lecturer and researcher at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute of the National University of Ireland in Galway, said in a phone interview.Victor Coustenoble shares a similar belief. He co-founded the OSocial.net project with Edwin Taylor to let people see their social-networking data in an open, portable way and let them securely build a friends list across site boundaries without the need for new registrations.&quot;About our participation, we are very interested to implement and use data portability ideas and specifications. It helps us to write applications easily for data management with standards and with a community support, which is very important for us,&quot; Coustenoble said.For Devin Holloway, the workgroup could yield historic results. He plans to move from Silicon Valley to Asia to pursue entrepreneurial opportunities where social networks, mobile phones and Internet technologies intersect.&quot;[Data portability] will pave the way for a future rich in services and applications that harness our aggregate data to help improve our lives in virtually every aspect. The [workgroup] is onto something that is going to change the world, and I&#39;m excited to be a part of the process,&quot; he said.Unfortunately, the enthusiasm, commitment, and passion displayed by participants, many of whom are acting as individual volunteers, hasn&#39;t so far been replicated by the major Internet players.While the decisions by Google and Facebook to become members put the workgroup in a news spotlight, their representatives don&#39;t seem to have yet participated in the forum discussions. Google and Facebook also declined to have their workgroup representatives be interviewed for this article. Each separately sent a brief, prepared statement saying that they want to participate in the group because they&#39;re committed to data portability.This isn&#39;t new. The CEOs of both companies at different times have said that their companies believe in data portability, and yet, neither them nor any other major Internet company can be said to have taken a leadership role in this effort.&quot;I haven&#39;t seen anything convincing from the big Internet companies that illustrates that they want to embrace this wholeheartedly,&quot; Breslin said. &quot;These sites haven&#39;t really been rushing to make their data portable yet.&quot;&quot;We are yet to see if they are fully committed. So far they have only committed to the conversation,&quot; said Saad, who is also CEO of Faraday Media in Australia and cofounder of the APML Workgroup. &quot;That being said, however, it&#39;s encouraging to see them take the first few steps in the right direction,&quot;This isn&#39;t a minor point. The DataPortability Workgroup and the other technical organizations could come up with fantastic solutions, but if the major Internet players -- and in particular the major social-networking sites -- don&#39;t adopt them, data portability will not become a reality for end-users. MySpace, Friendster, LinkedIn, and Bebo did not reply to requests for comment for this story.Maybe these Internet companies aren&#39;t truly convinced that data portability will be good for their businesses. In what some viewed as an example of words being inconsistent with actions, Facebook recently booted from its social network the well-known technology blogger Robert Scoble.Scoble&#39;s crime? He exported his contacts data in his Facebook account over to Plaxo&#39;s address book management service, Pulse. No can do, Facebook said, explaining that Plaxo&#39;s tool violated Facebook&#39;s terms of service and posed a security risk because it &quot;scraped&quot; the data from the social network. Scoble&#39;s account was later reinstated, but under the condition he doesn&#39;t do this again.If you operate a social-networking site -- or any site where people create an account or profile, list contacts and post content -- a way to discourage them from switching to a competitor is to make it hard or impossible for them to easily export and reuse that data elsewhere.Yet proponents of data portability like Saad say that things are starting to change, and that Facebook, MySpace, Google, and others need to wise up if they don&#39;t want to fall into disfavor with their users.What has changed is that these &quot;social&quot; sites have reached mainstream status, and a critical mass of users have realized the inconvenience of having to reenter and update a lot of the same information and content in multiple &quot;social&quot; sites and applications.&quot;As more and more applications start to feel the impact of social features, users will begin to demand a data portability solution. Either that or network fatigue will reduce adoption and eventually kill the fun,&quot; Saad said.For example, a concrete result of data portability could be a console-like management application where a person could manage his address book contacts, photos, videos, social news entries, social bookmarks and blog posts. With that application, the user would be able to share data between multiple social applications, sites and services.Unlike other vendors, Plaxo is heavily involved in data portability discussions and efforts precisely because its Pulse service has been designed to help people manage their dispersed contacts data across address books, sites, and e-mail accounts.&quot;By making data portable, you&#39;re enabling all these tools to work together. The user can be the hub and the different services can be spokes. That&#39;s what we&#39;re pushing for: Users in control of the data and interoperability among the services,&quot; said Joseph Smarr, Plaxo&#39;s chief platform architect.Ultimately, the problem represents an opportunity for Internet companies. &quot;In the end, whoever moves first to be truly open will have the advantage,&quot; Saad said.J. Trent Adams, founder and chief innovator at Matchmine, another vendor pushing for data portability, concurs. A stealthy startup could develop a clever application or service built on data portability standards and force other vendors to respond. &quot;All of a sudden, it&#39;s the right idea, and the big boys will have to react,&quot; Adams said.In other words, Internet companies who insist on locking up their users&#39; data to protect their businesses might soon find themselves instead stuck in the mud.
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'Supplier' issues slowing progress Ninety-two out of 150 councils will miss a government deadline to implement systems for sharing information about vulnerable children.â¦
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Software on the Seine, anyone? Backup in Budapest? VTL from Vienna? And why not. Europeans have far more experience when it comes to dealing with data regulatory issues than we do.
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We'll hide all the blank disks, promise The Data Sharing Review - announced by Gordon Brown after the loss of 25m records from the child benefit database - is calling for input into how government departments and businesses use and share private information about British people.â¦
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The UK government will store electronic records of people entering the UK in effort to tighten border control.