Free Republic

At an undetermined date, in an undisclosed location, the Biden administration began operating a secretive new court to protect Europeans’ privacy rights under U.S. law. Officially known as the Data Protection Review Court, it was authorized in an October 2022 executive order to fix a collision of European and American law that had been blocking the lucrative flow of consumer data between American and European companies for three years. The court’s eight judges were named last November, including former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder. Its existence has allowed companies to resume the lucrative transatlantic data trade with the blessing of...

Over the last six years American Internet security researchers have come to realize that much of the data stolen by Chinese hackers could be obtained, without breaking any laws, from commercial data brokers. While “data privacy” is often a major political issue few of these prominent critics seemed to realize that most of this data was available from commercial firms long before the government began building their own computerized personnel databases, which were subsequently stolen by foreign hackers. Collecting such data for commercial purposes has been going on for over a century. American firms pioneered the business of selling to...

Jeff Bezos must really be getting tired of these headlines coming up all the time. It seems that their facial recognition software (known as Rekognition) has been subjected to yet another test and come up a little short. Or a lot short, particularly if you happen to be one of the more than two dozen state lawmakers who showed up as hits matching them against a database of known criminals. But hey… when you’re making omelets you’ve got to crack a few eggs, right? (CBS San Francisco) A recent test of Amazon’s facial recognition technology reportedly ended with a major...

Facebook has targeted politicians around the world – including the former UK chancellor, George Osborne – promising investments and incentives while seeking to pressure them into lobbying on Facebook’s behalf against data privacy legislation, an explosive new leak of internal Facebook documents has revealed. The documents, which have been seen by the Observer and Computer Weekly, reveal a secretive global lobbying operation targeting hundreds of legislators and regulators in an attempt to procure influence across the world, including in the UK, US, Canada, India, Vietnam, Argentina, Brazil, Malaysia and all 28 states of the EU. The documents include details of...

Democrats are looking to seize on growing public worries about data privacy to rally voters in the upcoming midterms. Tech policy typically ranks low on an average voter’s list of priorities, prompting skepticism that data privacy can rally move the needle in an election. But in a couple key Senate races in Nevada and Arizona, Democratic campaign groups say public frustration over how corporations are able to suck up increasing amounts of consumer data could make a difference. They specifically want to use last year’s congressional vote to repeal broadband privacy regulations to attack Republicans. Only 15 House Republicans voted...

Precision Medicine Initiative and Data Security | whitehouse.gov (05/25/2016 White house decree) https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2016/05/25/precision-medicine-initiative-and-data-security?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTVRFNE1Ua3laRGRqTlRZMyIsInQiOiJ1R1VHbTk3M2o5NmhHSFQrOHNYdXZKakE4OW1tWTJlSUszSThzbnRnRkNlSGZjK2VCREJGWG5xemdyanpIQUdLU3pJSjBHYTdZd2hPUERUdmliaVBMZjA3SjNUYVY2WUt2Z1pTS0xXdTNqcz0ifQ%3D%3D Precision Medicine Initiative and Data Security May 25, 2016 at 3:00 PM ET by Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell, Lisa O. Monaco Twitter Facebook Email Summary: Today, we are pleased to release the final Data Security Policy Principles and Framework (Security Framework) for President Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI).     “We’re going to make sure that protecting patient privacy is built into our efforts from day one.”     - President Barack Obama, January 30th 2015 The health care system of the future is taking shape right now, and...

<p>Europe’s highest court on Tuesday struck down an international agreement that had made it easy for companies to move people’s digital data between the European Union and the United States.</p> <p>The ruling, by the European Court of Justice, could make it more difficult for global technology giants — including the likes of Amazon and Apple, Google and Facebook — to collect and mine online information from their millions of users in the 28-member European Union.</p>

Executive SummaryWe live digital lives—from the videos shared on social networks, to location-aware apps on mobile phones, to log-in data for connecting to our email, to our stored documents, to our search history. The personal, the profound, and even the absurd are all transcribed into data packets, whizzing through the fiber-optic arteries of the network. While our daily lives have upgraded to the 21st century, the law hasn’t kept pace. To date, the U.S. Congress hasn’t managed to update the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act to acknowledge that email stored more than 6 months deserves identical protections to email stored...

EU ombudsman Emily O’Reilly has accused the EU insitutions of being too ready to use the data protection “shield” as an argument against being more transparent. “Data protection is viewed as a major shield against transparency in these institutions. I see it on so many levels,” she said at a public discussion on Brussels lobbying on Wednesday (11 May). She noted that while in some member states a distinction is made between an official acting in their private capacity and acting as a public servant, “that distinction is far too blurred” in Brussels. Her remarks were directed at EU commissioner...