Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has just released its final privacy framework proposal, “Protecting Consumer Privacy in an Era of Rapid Change.” The agency released a draft report with the same title back in late 2010 and then asked for comments. [Here were my comments to the agency.] The FTC’s final report comes just a [...]
According to the BBC, the European Commission is apparently set to adopt formal rules guaranteeing a so-called “right to be forgotten” online. As part of the Commission’s overhaul of the 1995 Data Protection Directive, this new regulation will mandate that, “people will be able to ask for data about them to be deleted and firms [...]
Jane Yakowitz of Brooklyn Law School recently posted an interesting 63-page paper on SSRN entitled, “Tragedy of the Data Commons.” For those following the current privacy debates, it is must reading since it points out a simple truism: increased data privacy regulation could result in the diminution of many beneficial information flows. Cutting against the [...]
A headline in the USA Today earlier this week screamed, “Hello, Big Brother: Digital Sensors Are Watching Us.” It opens with an all too typical techno-panic tone, replete with tales of impending doom: Odds are you will be monitored today — many times over. Surveillance cameras at airports, subways, banks and other public venues are [...]
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) has a terrific op-ed piece on Internet-age government transparency in the Washington Times today: If agencies used consistent data formats for their financial information, their financial reports could be electronically reconciled. It would be possible to trace funds from Congressional appropriations through agencies’ budgets to final use. The same data could [...]
Yesterday, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) hosted an all-day workshop on “Protecting Kids’ Privacy Online,” which looked into the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 (COPPA) and challenges posed to its enforcement by new technological developments. The FTC staff did a nice job bringing together and moderating 5 panels worth of participants, all of [...]
Today, Berin Szoka and I both testified at the first of three Federal Trade Commission workshops on “Exploring Privacy.” Today’s all-day event featured five panel discussions, and remarks by FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz, Commissioner Pamela Jones Harbour, and David C. Vladeck, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. Our TLF co-blogging colleague Jim Harper [...]
It’s truly amazing how fast mobile broadband demand is expanding. A couple of things caught my eye yesterday that really drove that home. First, I was reading Bernstein Research’s weekly (subscription-only) newsletter and Craig Moffett, one of America’s top media and communications analysts, summarized the growing mobile bandwidth crunch as follows: To fully grasp the [...]
Last night here on the TLF, Bret Swanson raised a number of objections with this FCC-commissioned report about international broadband comparisons, which was conducted by some folks at Harvard University’s Berkman Center. Meanwhile, over at the Digital Society blog, George Ou also offers a hard-nosed look at the Berkman broadband report and concludes “The underlying [...]
The smell of high-tech regulation is increasingly in the air these days and many lawmakers and some activist groups now have the mobile marketplace in their regulatory cross-hairs. Critics make a variety of claims about the wireless market supposedly lacking competition, choice, innovation, or reasonable pricing. Consequently, they want to wrap America’s wireless sector in [...]
May 28, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
