Privacy News & Views
News from the world of Privacy & Consent
- Data Protection Scotland - Slides26 November 2009, 8:33 am
Toby Stevens' slides from two presentations to the Data Protection Scotland (http://www.publicserviceevents.co.uk/main/overview.asp?ID=128) event, held in Edinburgh on 25th November...... - EPG Workshops: Privacy, Security and Identity Under a Conservative Government20 November 2009, 10:20 am
Note: This event is oversubscribed and we are unable to offer up any more places. We will publish details of...... - Roundtable breakfast with James Brokenshire Conservative MP12 October 2009, 10:21 am
We're pleased to announce just a couple of free places for EPG Members at a breakfast briefing with James Brokenshire...... - RUSI - Cyber Security: A Public - Private Partnership1 October 2009, 12:10 pm
We're pleased to announce the availability of a very limited number of free places at the Royal...... - Tickets for Information Security in the Public Sector24 September 2009, 6:26 pm
We've a number of free tickets for EPG Members to Kable's forthcoming Information Security in the Public Sector (http://www.kable.co.uk/information-security)......
- Why seals don't always perform2 March 2010, 2:42 pm
The US Federal Trade Commission has just found so-called privacy and security certification service ControlScan guilty of failing to monitor the practices of its certified sites. In their settlement agreement, they state that "founder and former Chief Executive Officer has entered into a separate settlement that requires him to give up $102,000 in ill-gotten gains." ControlScan offered a variety of privacy and security seals for display on Web sites. Consumers could click on the seals to discov... - RSA Conference Europe opens call for speakers1 March 2010, 8:39 am
The RSA Conference Europe is now accepting calls for papers for the conference on 12-14 October in London. I've always found the event to be a great mix of security, identity and privacy content, and an excellent networking opportunity. If you're interested in a free VIP ticket, then now's the time to get your paper in - speaker submissions close on 9th April 2010. [Declaration of interests: I'm a panel judge for the conference, which is an unpaid role]... - Italian Court Convicts Google Execs26 February 2010, 7:40 am
An Italian court has flown in the face of the convention by convicting four Google executives - including Peter Fleischer, Google's Global Privacy Counsel - over a YouTube video that showed the bullying of a vulnerable boy. In 2006 a video was posted by a user showing the autistic boy being assaulted by classmates. Google received two complaints from Italian authorities, within 24 hours had removed the content from the site, and thereafter assisted an investigation to try to identify the culprit... - Government backs down on increased data theft penalties22 February 2010, 7:40 am
The Ministry of Justice has once again dropped plans to increase penalties against those who recklessly or deliberately misuse personal information. As part of its response to the Data Sharing Review, the Ministry of Justice proposed enhanced powers for the Information Commissioner's Office and new penalties for abuse of personal data. These were largely welcomed by all parties (with most debate around whether the penalties needed to go even further), and a public consultation was held last year... - More silliness about body scanners16 February 2010, 12:56 pm
The Nudatrons* are back in the news again, as the Equality and Human Rights Commission has warned that their use in UK airports may be illegal, with a primary concern about how individuals might be selected for scanning as opposed to a traditional metal detector scan. In response, the government has stated it is carrying out an equalities impact, and the Department for Transport has published an interim Code of Practice for body scanning. The debate over acceptability of body scanners, which wer...
- Why virtual identities are real to some of us8 March 2010, 8:23 am
I remember discussing this with someone -- but due to my advancing years, I can't remember who -- a few months ago after reading some of the reputation-realted discussion on the Burton Group blog. The discussion about Personas Need Reputation, Too! was about what a protocol to support reputation might look like. The idea was to enable multiple parties to engage and have the outcome of the engagement (in the form of claims about relationships) communicated.... - 2 + 2 = X5 March 2010, 1:57 pm
[Dave Birch] I went to an enjoyable dinner (under Chatham House Rule) organised by DEMOS (a think tank that published a paper on privacy called "Putting People First" a couple of years ago) to discuss some issues around identity and...... - Travel advisory2 March 2010, 8:27 pm
As has been discussed many times before, the current e-passport is a complement to the physical passport: that's why it's a chip inside the passport, not a chip instead of a passport BAC locks the passport so that you have to physically read the passport MRTD in order to read the data from the chip (this is not strictly true, by the way, because the MRTD data isn't random, but that's a detail). ... Note, incidentally, that while the UK is outside the Schengen area, the UK biometric resident p... - Moving to Privacy 3.025 February 2010, 8:52 pm
[Dave Birch] A typically excellent piece from Jan Chipchase that I've continued to think about again and again since reading it. Commenting on the Facebook privacy stories that have were around recently, he asked whether the Facebook privacy "moment" is:...... - “Location-based” login protection19 February 2010, 11:03 pm
[Dave Petch] It’s not often the case that eBay users find cause to congratulate the internet giant, in fact quite the opposite is usually the case. Whether it’s seller rebellion against fee hikes, anger at seller policy changes, lawsuits against......
- Niche market...1 March 2010, 5:02 pm
Knowing how Eve loves a Venn diagram, I thought this was the best way to gauge interest in my new line of badges. Plus, I wouldn't want you to think I had launched a new product without doing a thorough market segmentation exercise first. So here it is, fresh from the back of the envelope...The back-story is here, on Eve's blog. It occurred to her (and who am I to argue?), that a healthy mind-set for data sharing these days is not to try and prevent it ever happening, but to work on ways of ensu... - The hidden risks of biometric credentials1 March 2010, 3:01 pm
Over on the Hawktalk blog, Chris Pounder has a characteristically incisive analysis of some of the privacy problems which arise out of the deployment of biometric passports. If you don't follow Hawktalk already, I'd recommend it. In the meantime, here's a copy of the comment I've added on Chris' post, setting out some of the further implications.In many of the early discussions about the NIS/NIR[1] it was just noted, as an "inconvenient side-effect" of biometric enrolment, that individuals who l... - Insalubrious premisses23 February 2010, 7:42 pm
From time to time, someone points out that the security of most ID/password-based website authentications actually depends on the (quite unrelated) security of the user's primary email account... in the sense that that's where most of the password reset confirmation messages get sent.In fact, it's worth assessing the risk of just how many sites you could be locked out of, if (say) you could no longer access the email account(s) you specified when you registered with them.I see the folks at Faceb... - Identity, Privacy and the Post-bureaucratic Age23 February 2010, 6:56 pm
I was at a fascinating (if chilly) conference yesterday to hear a gratifyingly diverse bunch of panellists express their views on the so-called "Post-Bureaucratic Age" (PBA... Twitter hash-tag #pbage in case that's how you prefer to get fed). A strong "draw" for the morning session was the appearance of David Cameron to set out how a Post-Bureaucratic strategy could help square the circle of improving public services while wrestling with colossal budget constraints.I'm not going to try and defin... - Google Buzz: what's the appropriate reaction?17 February 2010, 10:47 am
I must admit, I'm so undecided over this one that two hands are no longer sufficient...On the one hand, I am actually grateful to Google for the fact that their botched implementation and deployment of Buzz has brought some of the flaws of "social networking" to the fore. There's intelligent, rational and perceptive comment from John Pescatore at Gartner, for instance.The term "social networking" perpetuates a deception in which users, myself included, have been too happy to collude... the idea ...
- charlie brookers on passwords2 March 2010, 10:45 am
Nice piece by the ever acerbic Charlie Brooker in the Guardian which cuts to the core of some of the 'identity management' problems that currently exist with online security.In this age of rampant identity theft, where it's just a matter of time beforesomeone works out a way to steal your reflection in the mirror and use it tocommit serial bigamy in an alternate dimension, we're told only a maniac woulduse the same password for everything. But passwords used to be forspeakeasy owners or spi... - spy laptops in schools26 February 2010, 1:57 pm
This is in the news a fair bit, and here's some good investigative work on it.http://strydehax.blogspot.com/2010/02/spy-at-harrington-high.htmlyet more surveillance of kids (from boing boing) on 'how google saved a school' - egregious surveillance at about 4-5min into this cliphttp://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/learning/schools/how-google-saved-a-school.html?play... - Westerminer Legal Policy Forum - comment22 February 2010, 2:11 pm
[after the conference last wednesday, every delegate was given the opportunity to contribute a short article to the forthcoming publication. I wrote and submitted the following]Privacy is a social good. Whilst privacy is important for the individual in terms of self-development, autonomy, personal dignity, and the exercise of fundamental human rights, this is not the extent of the concept. We are increasingly becoming aware that a lack of privacy, increasing surveillance and a vulnerability to a... - Westminster Legal Policy Forum18 February 2010, 2:27 pm
Westminster Legal Policy ForumSurveillance: use, effectiveness and enforcing data protectionWednesday 17th FebruaryI was at this event yesterday.Transcript of all sessions released in a week. So this is preliminary notes and thoughts, so excuse the slightly scrappy nature in places. Philip Virgo – EURIM – ChairOnly a 1/3 of population care about privacy (but they do care)Simple policy area if understand that technology doesn’t work, nobody reads policy, most will accept defaults, and that... - The Phising flow chart (phlow chart?)12 February 2010, 4:55 pm
Found on website Login Helper, this is the phishing email flowchart, a companion to their how to identify fishing attacks guide. It handy in that it's visual, but I'm not sure it's the most elegantly designed version it could be. Having this material in a flow chart (decision support framework at all?) might be one useful way of visualising online privacy protecting behaviour, and general advivce/guidance.(I found it on LifeHacker.com, highly recommended)...
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