Europeans uneasy on online data safety
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Three out of four Europeans are worried about posting their personal information on the Internet.
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The European Commission launched a drive to boost consumer confidence in buying online, amid signs of mistrust about making cross-border purchases over the Internet.
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Some US computer users vastly under-estimate the dangers of going online, a survey shows.
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Most computer users believe they are safe from online threats even as their machines fall victim to viruses and spyware, according to a survey.
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An independent European Union panel is investigating whether Google Inc.'s Internet search engine abides by European privacy rules, which tend to be stricter than those in the United States.
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People in the U.K. spend more time online than the rest of Europe or the U.S., a new study finds.
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Europe&#39;s top data protection officials are working to clarify a grey area of Internet law: the legal status of an IP address.The question of whether an IP address should be considered private data occupied much time at a hearing earlier this week at the European Parliament regarding Google&#39;s planned acquisition of DoubleClick. If a person can be identified by an IP address, then the address is private, said Peter Schaar, the German data protection commissioner and chairman of the Europe-wide privacy group, the Article 29 Committee.This has been the rule in most countries in the European Union for more than 10 years. However, it is hard to set a clear-cut rule because some ISPs&#160;give out fresh IP addresses to subscribers each time they go online, and people also buy time online at Internet cafes.The Article 29 Committee has been examining the question of IP addresses as part of its analysis of how search engines respect European data protection rules. It is expected to reach some conclusions by mid-June, according to an official working for the committee who asked not to be named.The committee cannot fine transgressors of E.U. data protection rules, nor can it propose legislation, but it can prompt the European Commission to do so.Internet search companies, including Google, argue that an IP address merely locates a computer rather than identifying who is sitting at that computer. Treating IP addresses as personal information would have implications for how search engines record and use people&#39;s data.If the committee persuaded lawmakers to toughen IP address protection in Europe &quot;that would definitely change things [for search engines],&quot; said John Steinback, a spokesman on policy matters for Google.From Google&#39;s perspective, whether an IP address is personal depends on the context, Steinback said. An ISP can link an IP address to a subscriber, but a Web site visited by the person using a specific IP address cannot link the address to a person, he explained.The European Parliament hearing was convened by the assembly&#39;s civil liberties committee to assess whether citizens&#39; privacy would be harmed by Google&#39;s planned acquisition of Internet advertising company DoubleClick. The deal, which has already been given the green light by U.S. regulators, is under investigation by European Commission competition officials. However, like its U.S. equivalents, the Commission won&#39;t consider the privacy question.Nevertheless, if data being collected for one purpose by one of the companies is then handed over to the other company for use in a different way, European data protection officials would be obliged to intervene, said the official close to the Article 29 Committee.&quot;Google will have to respect all the obligations of DoubleClick, including its data protection obligations,&quot; the official said. If the two databases are to be used for the same purposes, then they would be deemed compatible and could merge. &quot;But if there was an incompatibility between the two databases, then they couldn&#39;t be merged,&quot; he said.The European Parliament&#39;s civil liberties committee said it would be holding more seminars to examine the issues surrounding data protection in the months and years to come.
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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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(InfoWorld) - Data protection officials from 27 European countries have warned Google it is storing data on people's searches for too long -- but Europe's top privacy guardian, the European Data Protection Supervisor Peter Hustinx, believes Google's efforts to respect the privacy of European citizens in its Internet search software "is not just window dressing."His comments at a conference in Amsterdam on Thursday come a week after the data protection officials wrote to the company, expressing concerns that the company could be breaching European laws by holding on to details about people's Internet searches for too long.The officials from each of the 27 member states of the European Union sit on a Europe-wide data protection committee called the Article 29 Working Group, which is chaired by Hustinx.The group has asked Google to justify why it needs to retain the data for up to two years, and whether the company has "fulfilled all the necessary requirements" on data protection. European Justice and Home Affairs Commissioner Franco Frattini said Friday that the questions posed in that letter are "legitimate."But speaking on the sidelines of a data protection conference in Amsterdam, which Google's global privacy chief Peter Fleischer was also attending, Hustinx played down the inquiry."I see a company which has very powerful tools, thinking about integrating privacy solutions -- that's the big picture," he said.Google's efforts to respect people's privacy "isn't just window dressing, but we will hold them to what they are saying," he added.His comments came directly after Fleischer made a presentation explaining how Google's personal search function works. Users can opt in to this more refined search tool, using a log-in identity and password. Once they have done so, the search engine takes their Internet searching history into consideration when picking results for new searches.For example, if you have been searching for cars recently and you tap in the search term "golf", the results will focus on cars of that model rather than on the sport, Fleischer explained.Users of the personalized search function can delete searches they made in the past, in order to prevent them influencing the search results they get in future, Fleischer added.By allowing people to opt in to the personalized search function and by giving them the ability to customize their search history, Google was respecting people's privacy, Fleischer said.Google stores information about all searches, both personalized and normal, he said, but details of normal searches can't be linked to an individual."Google does have the information but it can't link it to you," he said.In the past, Fleischer has said that the company needs to keep details of people's searches for security reasons, to help guard against hacking.Information about people's searches can also help track criminal activity such as child porn rings, but security agencies are mainly interested in the information Google stores on the users of its e-mail service, Gmail, he said.The police aren't interested in the information about people's general searches, he said. He declined to comment on whether details about subscribers to the personalized search function had been accessed by the authorities.European data protection law limits the amount of time companies can hold on to personal data gleaned from electronic networks to the amount of time the information is required for billing purposes. The law was written mainly with fixed and mobile phone technology in mind, but it also applies to data gathered from Internet searches.Fleischer said the law, passed in 1995 when Google hadn't been born, is totally out of date and he urged European lawmakers to update it to take account of new technologies."The technical architecture has changed a lot since 1995, even though the basic principles of privacy still apply. The time has come to re-think some of this process," he said.In particular, the way the law deals with international transfers of data has to be reviewed, he said. Europe has one of the toughest data protection regimes in the world. The law forbids the passing of personal information about European citizens to other parts of the world with more lax data protection regimes.The U.S. is considered to offer inferior data protection, so companies operating on both sides of the Atlantic have to sign complicated get-out clauses in order to pass information about their staff or customers to offices in the U.S."The Internet is all about international transfers," Fleischer said. He wants the different parts of the world to cooperate in order to create a single approach to data protection "We as a company have a single approach to privacy right across the world. We can't run a system that has different privacy levels for, say Google.com and the Dutch site Google.nl -- that would be crazy."So if we can do it why can't policymakers?" he asked.He called for a global privacy treaty. "It will be complicated and will probably take a decade, but the technology of the internet has been a wake-up call for policymakers that this is needed. We need to start talking now. We in the industry have to start the debate," he said.
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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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PNR and Swift finally put to bed - but still restless The US has capitulated to EU demands that its use of European data in counter-terrorism operations should be subject to foreign scrutiny.â¦
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InfoWorld - Data protection officials from 27 European countries have warned Google it is storing data on people&#39;s searches for too long -- but Europe&#39;s top privacy guardian, the European Data Protection Supervisor Peter Hustinx, believes Google&#39;s efforts to respect the privacy of European citizens in its Internet search software &quot;is not just window dressing.&quot;
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As eastern Europe improves privacy safeguards for its citizens, western Europe and the United States are stepping up surveillance. The U.S. and Britain rank with China and Russia as the among the most intrusive of governments.
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As passports equipped with RFID chips are adopted more widely around the world, successful attempts to crack them are on the rise as well. Germany, the Netherlands and the U.K. have already reported compromised data, but countries such as New Zealand remain unconcerned about such threats. But what if the goal wasn't data theft but detonation?
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Consumers are becoming more worried about the potential dangers of e-commerce in the wake of data breaches that have occurred in recent years, according to a survey by the Ponemon Institute.
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By ROBERT WIELAARD    STRASBOURG, France  -- Governments and private sector officials from around the world sought ways Thursday to jointly combat cybercrime, whose growth mirrors the phenomenal rise of the Internet's popularity.    At a conference organized by the Council of Europe, delegates from Europe, the United States, Australia and China digested new data pointing to an increasing problem of global proportions: How can national law stop those who commit fraud, spread racism, steal credit card numbers or sell child pornography worldwide, nonstop and just about anonymously?    On top of that, while fraud and copyright infringements remain the lion's share of cybercrime, there is rising concern about terrorists going online to spread more than just propaganda...
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IT experts issue a warning over a potential security risk to primary school pupils' personal data.