Scottish Government aims to embed privacy principles to improve public confidence in identity management |
| Public sector organisations in Scotland should avoid creating large centralised databases of personal information and keep clear audit trails of how identity data is used, under new proposals published yesterday by the Scottish Government.Read more at www.egovmonitor.com |
Governments need to get smarter about use of cookies to enable better service delivery, while balancing privacy concerns. | CDT Comments on Federal Web Policy Proposal |
| CDT and EFF today submitted joint comments to the Office of Management and Budget in response to the agency’s proposed review of the policies governing the use of cookies and other web technologies. OMB’s suggested framework begins to address some of the deficiencies regarding current federal policy; however, the final version of the policy must include more granular and comprehensive privacy protections |
Shortening cookies: Using OpenID to improve government privacy online |
The proposal is narrowly limited to allowing as much pseudonymity as I
could around logging on to government sites. There may be intriguing
ways it could also promote pseudonymity for contributions
made by these visitors (such as whistle-blowers); but I’ll leave that
idea for later after I can talk to more experts about it.
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Summary: Privacy requirements could be met by creating a government
web site backed by OpenID where people wishing to participate in
government web discussions can register without providing personal
information.
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Each government agency that wishes to track visitor participation can
authenticate the visitor through the central government OpenID
server. Although OpenID requires sites to accept and store cookies,
they contain or point to minimal personal information.
Read more at broadcast.oreilly.com |
| Federal Websites: Cookie Policy |
| As part of our effort to create a more open and innovative government, we’re working on a new cookie policy that we’ll want your input on. |
| This past June, we blogged about ways to enhance citizen participation in government through basic policy changes, including revisions to the current policy on web-tracking technologies. |
| OMB is considering a three-tiered approach to the use of web tracking technologies on Federal Government websitesRead more at blog.ostp.gov |
Suzanne Breen’s court victory to protect her sources contrasts starkly with a judge’s ruling that unmasked NightJack |
Journalists won an important victory last week when a judge in a Belfast court ruled that Suzanne Breen, the Northern Ireland editor of the Dublin-based Sunday Tribune, would not have to hand over to police source material related to stories she had written about the Real IRA. |
| Breen’s victory came as the identity of a detective constable who was an award-winning blogger called NightJack was revealed after the high court lifted an injunction that had prevented the Times outing him. Read more at www.guardian.co.uk |
Survey: Teens ’sext’ and post personal info |
An Internet safety study (PDF) just released by Cox Communications shows that teens may be a bit more safety conscious than previously thought.
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Not surprisingly, the vast majority of teens (72 percent) have a social-networking profile, while 73 percent use cell phones and 91 percent have an e-mail address. |
What they know vs. what they do
The study raises an interesting contradiction. 59 percent of the teens say that posting personal information or photos on public blogs or social-networking sites is either “somewhat unsafe” or “very unsafe.” Only 7 percent say it’s “very safe,” while 34 percent say it’s “somewhat safe.” Yet, when asked about their own behavior, 62 percent of the kids post photos of themselves, 50 percent share their real age, 45 percent the name of their school, and 41 percent the city where they live. When it comes to more private information, only 4 percent post their address, 9 percent “places where you typically go,” and 14 percent post their cell phone number. Read more at news.cnet.com |
| Our recommendations for increasing citizens’ access to government information |
In response to President Obama’s call for ideas on how to open up the government to its citizens, Google put forward recommendations last Friday in which we point to two simple steps government webmasters can take to make sure that search engine queries lead users to the right websites and hopefully, the right answers. |
First, agencies can adopt the Sitemaps protocol, which allow search engines to crawl websites more intelligently. Most search engines offer free Sitemap generator tools — check out Google Sitemap Generator. |
Second, agencies can review their robots.txt files. Many agencies currently block large portions of their websites from search engines with robots.txt files, sometimes unknowingly. By reviewing and selectively using these files, webmasters can easily open up large amounts of content to citizens. Free analysis tools like Google’s robots.txt test can help webmasters identify which pages are accidentally being blocked. |
The next stage in the campaign for open government will come when the Administration encourages agencies to publish their most popular, timely, and relevant data on their websites and data.gov. Static, obscure, and dated information is not useful to citizens who want data relevant to their everyday lives, nor is it helpful to third parties who want to build tools that citizens can use to understand that data. |
IBM touts encryption innovation |
New technology performs calculations on encrypted data without decrypting it |
Network World -
IBM today said one of its researchers has made it possible for computer systems to perform calculations on encrypted data without decrypting it. |
IBM says the breakthrough would let computer services, such as Google Inc. or others storing the confidential, electronic data of others, fully analyze data on their clients’ behalf without expensive interaction with the client and without seeing any of the private data. Read more at www.computerworld.com |
Elgan: Why Google Voice is free |
Of all the free services Google Voice provides, it’s likely that transcription of voicemails is the most expensive for Google. Users tell me that transcription is very accurate, which probably means humans are doing it. My guess is that short, easy messages are machine-transcribed, but that longer messages are off-shored to human transcribers. |
Gmail’s invasion of your personal messages is just the beginning. In the future, I believe the company intends to combine what it knows about you — friends, family, purchases, location, schedule, blog posts and especially what you talk about in e-mail, text messages, chat and telephone calls — into knowledge about what you want to buy. It will then show you ads based on that knowledge. |
If all this sounds sinister, it isn’t. This is simply where advertising is going. Most people have demonstrated willingness to give up privacy for free stuff. And in fact, contextual advertising itself is desirable. It’s better to be pitched products you’re likely to want rather than products you don’t want. |
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Scottish Government aims to embed privacy principles
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