RFID tags

Article published at KSTP

Privacy and security need to be built into radio frequency identification tags before they become widespread, the European Commission said, announcing it would publish guidelines later this year.

RFID chips can be used to automatically identify and verify passports, luggage, livestock or pharmaceuticals and have a wide range of potential uses, from telling doctors what medicines patients have been given to instantly pointing out expired food.

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RFID Consultation Website

European Commission RFID Website

Privacy & Data Protection 2007

The 5th Annual
Privacy & Data Protection 2007
"Data Protection: Global Compliance Management"
25 September 2007
Trinity House
Tower Hill, London

Privacy, Identity, and Anonymity in Web 2.0

Via Spyblog I have found Ralf Bendrath blog. Both of them very interesting

Ralf Bendrath blog is about thoughts and observations of a privacy, security and internet researcher and activist.

Ralf was one of the speakers of Privacy, Identity and Anonymity in Web 2.0 (Slides are available)

SpyBlog I think it is the most completed website about UK privacy.

Text from Spyblog

The Irish based Front Line Defenders charity has published a very useful free online book, entitled Digital Security & Privacy for Human Rights Defenders (9Mb .pdf 164 pages) with text mostly by Dmitri Vitaliev, but with contributions from the likes of Privacy International, Professor Ross Anderson and Stephen Murdoch from the University of Cambridge Computer Science Laboratory etc.

Commission proposes a European policy strategy for smart radio tags

European Commission Press Release

Exactly one year after launching an extensive Europe-wide public consultation on radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, the Commission has unveiled on 15 March 2007 its proposals for an RFID strategy for Europe. The Commission, in particular, proposes to address the privacy concerns of citizens to boost consumer confidence and Europe's position in a market experiencing 60% growth globally.

(15/03/2007) "From fighting counterfeits to better healthcare, smart RFID-chips offers tremendous opportunities for business and society," said Information Society and Media Commissioner Viviane Reding when presenting the Commission's strategy today at CeBIT, the world's largest annual IT fair in Hanover, Germany. "Last year I said here at CeBIT that we should stimulate the use of RFID technology in Europe whilst safeguarding personal data and privacy. The Commission's Europe-wide public consultation in 2006 identified a strong lack of awareness and considerable concern among citizens. The Commission's RFID strategy will therefore seek to raise awareness, stress the absolute need for citizens to decide how their personal data is used and ensure that Europe removes existing obstacles to RFID's enormous potential."

RFID – also called smart radio tags – is a technology which involves tags that emit radio signals as identifiers, and devices that pick up the signal and identify the tags. It has a wide range of applications and does not require direct contact or line-of-sight scanning.

Full press release

Communication : English - French - German

Consultation report

The big ones . . .

Google Adopts New Privacy Measures

Google plans to dump search query data after some 18 to 24 months in a move designed to ease concerns over privacy, privacy advocates are saying that Google's privacy plans do not go far enough. . .

If you want to know more, read the log retention FAQ (PDF).

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Microsoft executive: Digital privacy is 'issue of our time'

Digital privacy will be one of the biggest legal issues of the century, a senior Microsoft executive predicted in a meeting with a group of University of Michigan law students last week.Brad Smith, Microsoft's senior vice president, general counsel and corporate secretary for legal and corporate affairs, addressed "The Role of Global Companies in the Development and Implementation of International Law" in his talk at U-M's Hutchins Hall.

SAITS

SAITS is a swedish project leadership by the Swedish Institute of Computer Science and Institutet för rättsinformatik, Stockholms Universitet. This project is supported by Vinnova.

Source Text: SAITS Project

The SAITS project will generate knowledge about the meaning and significance of the term privacy in future IT environments, how the technological development creates privacy risks as well as possibilities to protect and enhance privacy, and how regulations can control how different actors behaves in IT environments.

Privacy is a key factor in the future Swedish IT society. In order to achieve the political IT agenda that the Swedish government has set forth, privacy in IT environments needs to be both defined and supported. As an effect of convergence and the overall development of the IT society, the meaning and understanding of the term privacy will change. This will require that regulations are adapted to these changing conditions.

The SAITS project will generate knowledge about the meaning and significance of the term privacy in future IT environments, how the technological development creates privacy risks as well as possibilities to protect and enhance privacy, and how regulations can control how different actors behaves in IT environments.

The direct results of the SAITS project will be in the form of reports, seminars, and workshops that will describe privacy from a number of viewpoints. The goal of these results is to create a foundation for further work about technologies, privacy needs, and regulations.

The project will also form a national competence in the field of IT privacy. This will be manifested through the network of competence that will be developed throughout the project period.

Workshop on Surveillance & Inequality

Workshop on Surveillance & Inequality (2007)

March 16-18, 2007; Arizona State University; Tempe, Arizona, USA

This workshop will bring together a multi-disciplinary and international array of scholars studying the social implications of contemporary surveillance with a particular interest in questions of the public sphere, equality, civil liberties, privacy, and fairness. The findings of the workshops will be disseminated by means of a special issue of the journal Surveillance & Society.

Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World

Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World by Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu

Is the Internet erasing national borders? Will the future of the Net be set by Internet engineers, rogue programmers, the United Nations, or powerful countries? Who's really in control of what's happening on the Net? In this provocative new book, Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu tell the fascinating story of the Internet's challenge to governmental rule in the 1990s, and the ensuing battles with governments around the world. It's a book about the fate of one idea: that the Internet might liberate us forever from government, borders, and even our physical selves. We learn of Google's struggles with the French government and Yahoo's capitulation to the Chinese regime; of how the European Union sets privacy standards on the Net for the entire world; and of eBay's struggles with fraud and how it slowly learned to trust the FBI. In a decade of events the original vision is uprooted, as governments time and time again assert their power to direct the future of the Internet. The destiny of the Internet over the next decades, argue Goldsmith and Wu, will reflect the interests of powerful nations and the conflicts within and between them. While acknowledging the many attractions of the earliest visions of the Internet, the authors describe the new order, and speaking to both its surprising virtues and unavoidable vices. Far from destroying the Internet, the experience of the last decade has lead to a quiet rediscovery of some of the oldest functions and justifications for territorial government. While territorial governments have unavoidable problems, it has proven hard to replace what legitimacy governments have, and harder yet to replace the system of rule of law that controls the unchecked evils ofanarchy. While the Net will change some of the ways that territorial states govern, it will not diminish the oldest and most fundamental roles of government and challenges of governance.

Sociology at Microsoft

Image source wikipedia. Nicolas de Fer: Veue de Constantinople, Paris 1696, from: Les Forces De L'Europe, Ou Description Des Principales Villes, 8 / 23

Interview published at Technology Review

Marc Smith, the senior research sociologist at Microsoft Research, believes that now is a good time to practice his trade. Thanks to the Internet, there is unprecedented access to sociological data. And thanks to computers, sociologists are better able to sift through that data, find trends, and test models.

At Microsoft, Smith uses public Internet data to look at the social phenomenon of online communities, and he tries to make them better for people and better for business. He recently gave a presentation regarding his work at Microsoft's TechFest in Redmond, WA, an annual event at which Microsoft researchers from around the world share their latest work. Technology Review caught up with Smith to ask him about the field of cybersociology.

Read the interview

Gates wants new privacy law

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 law should allow consumers to control their personal data, provide transparency about what their data is used for, and require they be notified when their data has been compromised, Gates said.

Gates said he believes the United States 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, he 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

The Surveillance Project

TEXT AND LOGO SOURCE: THE SURVEILLANCE PROJECT WEBSITE

The Surveillance Project is a multi-disciplinary and international collaborative initiative at the cutting edge of social science research. We are based in the Department of Sociology at Queen's University, Kingston, Canada. Our work also supports appropriate policy development and contributes to an understanding of the contemporary politics of information.

The Surveillance Project researches both the workings of large surveillance systems -- data, video, audio -- and their interactions with ordinary people -- workers, travelers, consumers, citizens. Our work impacts attitudes and policy; our academic study informs and challenges all to greater care and accountability in processing personal data.

The Surveillance Project researches the ways in which personal data are processed. We explore why information about people has become so important in the 21st century and what are the social, political and economic consequences of this trend. Questions of "privacy" and of "social sorting" are central to our concerns.

Surveillance is "any systematic attention to a person's life aimed at exerting influence over it" (James Rule). So The Surveillance Project studies everything from supermarket loyalty cards to police networks searching for suspects. We have a special interest in the surveillance aspects of post 9/11 quest for tightened security. While high-tech methods have become very significant, we also examine surveillance as face-to-face supervision or as mediated watching using video cameras.

Surveillance is not simply about large organizations using sophisticated computer equipment. It is also about how ordinary people - citizens, workers, travelers, and consumers - interact with surveillance. Some comply, others negotiate, and yet others resist. The Surveillance Project explores how expanding flows of personal data affect and are affected by everyday life.
Surveillance raises important issues such as privacy, anonymity, and trust. But because surveillance is related to risk management and to modes of governance it also involves what we call social sorting. Social groups are classified so that they can receive different treatment. So questions of social justice and democratic participation are at least as important as those of security and privacy.

UK telcos lead in online accessibility but fall down on privacy

text source: By Maggie Holland at ITPRO

Telco websites in the UK are more accessible than those in Canada or the US, but British players still need to get a better handle on privacy, according to research from The Customer Respect Group.

UK telecommunications companies are better than their North American counterparts when it comes to making their websites more accessible for people with visual impairment or mobility disabilities, according to the findings of the First Quarter 2007 Online Customer Respect Study of the Global Telecommunications Industry.

But, in contrast, we still lag behind Canada and the US when it comes to respecting the privacy of personal data, claims the report compiled by research and consultancy firm The Customer Respect Group.


Read the full article. . .

CRCS Privacy & Security Lunch Seminar

CRCS Privacy & Security Lunch Seminar - Wed. March 7

Speaker: Ivan Krstic, One Laptop per ChildDate: Wednesday, 7 MarchTime: talk 12-1, discussion 1-1:30 (lunch provided)

Place: Harvard University. Center for Research on Computation and Society.

Maxwell Dworkin 119

Title: How do you secure 100 million laptops? A security model for the One Laptop per Child

Abstract: One Laptop per Child (OLPC) is a non-profit organization aiming to redefine learning and education for the world’s children by providing each child with a specially- developed, innovative and low-cost laptop. More than 5 million laptops will reach children in developing countries this year, with another 50-100 million in the next two years. The scale of the deployment, the laptop’s unique hardware and software stacks, and a target user group as young as 6 all present some extremely difficult challenges in providing a secure user experience. We present Bitfrost, an integrated security platform for the OLPC XO laptop designed to address these challenges.

RFID and Ubiquitous Computing

"RFID and Ubiquitous Computing"

Marc Rotenberg, EPIC Executive Director

Trans Atlantic Consumer Dialogue

Brussels, BelgiumMarch 12, 2007

Little Brother

Two articles:

USA TODAY. Maria Puente, writes this article: Hello to less privacy.

Oh, for the good old days when all we worried about was Big Brother government watching us. Too late: Now we have Little Brother to contend with, too — and he has a camera phone.

Little Brother could be a fed-up straphanger on a subway, a sneaky student in class, maybe a ticked-off guy in the audience. Or a vengeful ex-lover or jealous friends looking to embarrass an American Idol contestant.

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FOXNEWS. by Susan Estrich. Do Old Privacy Protections Apply in Digitized, Terrorized Society?

The Washington Post summary of a soon-to-be released Government Accounting Office report says the government has already committed significant privacy violations in testing a new and highly sophisticated data mining system.

ADVISE, which stands for Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight and Semantic Enhancement, uses mathematical algorithms to look for connections in data that might reveal suspicious people, behavior, places, or relationships.

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