Hmmm. What to do. I’ve already got a law. Harper’s law states: “The security and privacy risks increase proportionally to the square of the number of users of the data.”
So maybe I also have to have a theorem. Harper’s Theorem states: “People call privacy a ‘right’ just before they drop it in the blender.”
So my blender detector went on high alert today when I saw Hugo Teufel characterize privacy as a “fundamental right”
twice in a recent post on the Department of Homeland Security’s Leadership Journal blog. He’s Chief Privacy Officer at DHS.
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Microsoft’s Kim Cameron writes on the big UK identity breach, calling it an “Identity Chernobyl.” Choice observation:
Isn’t it incredible that “a junior official” could simply “download” detailed personal and financial information on 25 million people? Why would a system be designed this way?
To me this is the equivalent of assembling a vast pile of dynamite in the middle of a city on the assumption that excellent procedures would therefore be put in place, so no one would ever set it off.
There is no need to store all of society’s dynamite in one place, and no need to run the risk of the collosal explosion that an error in procedure might produce.
Similarly, the information that is the subject of HMRC’s identity catastrophe should have been partitioned – broken up both in terms of the number of records and the information components.
Were our REAL ID Act implemented, we would have similar piles of identity dynamite placed around the country waiting to explode. The
proposed regulations implementing REAL ID punted on the security and privacy issues, perhaps “on the assumption that excellent procedures would therefore be put in place” by states.
Final REAL ID regulations are expected Real Soon Now.
TheFunded.com is an interesting site where people who have pitched VCs get to report on their experience. There was a big story on it in Wired this month.
Interested as I am in the entrepreneurship that
is was is the Internet, I’ve been looking over the posts and came across an interesting one, about Accel Partners:
We pitched Kevin Efrusy on taking a round and he provided excellent advice …
He liked what we were doing but suggested to NOT take funding since we were profitable.
He was concerned that our exit wouldn’t be high enough to justify their investment but thinks that we’d probably get acquired in the next year.
Being a serial entrepreneur I’ll certainly pitch Accel again and recommend them to others.
Spot the albatross? I’ll point it out after the break.
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I’ve testified and written several times about how such things as REAL ID and “electronic employment eligibility verification” are threats to our identity system. Collecting identity information in one place is the creation of new security risks. Now the UK has proven it – so we don’t have to!
The sensitive personal details of 25 million Britons could have fallen into the hands of identity fraudsters after a government agency lost the entire child benefit database in the post.
A major police investigation is being conducted after Alistair Darling, the Chancellor, admitted yesterday that names, addresses, birth dates, national insurance numbers and bank account details of every child benefit claimant in the country had gone missing.
Most likely, this data is just lost, but in the wrong hands it would provide criminals all they need to impersonate any of these 25 million people.
The persons responsible have been sacked. Specifically, Paul Gray, chairman of HM Revenue & Customs office.
Patient Privacy Rights is campaigning to restrict the use of prescription information. I was impressed by their video.
http://www.youtube.com/v/sdoyMFPxlBY&rel=1%22%3E%3C/param%3E%3Cparam%20name=
The thing I like about the campaign is that it’s mostly directed at pharmacy chains. I’d like pharmacies’ practices with prescription information to be one of the dimensions on which they compete. We need more information and we should use it when we decide which pharmacy to go to.
A wee quibble: The video talks about what the law should be, and the campaign cc:s members of Congress. I’m not impressed with legislative attempts to protect privacy. The legislative process is a playground dominated by organized interests – governments, corporations, and their lobbyists – not by consumers. In fact, the PPR site links to a Hastings Center report that documents nicely how the HIPPA “privacy rule” is not a privacy protection at all. My own effort on that score, from a few years back, is here.
That gloss aside, though, restriction of prescription information is the right outcome, and addressing the issue to pharmacy chains in the right way to pursue it.
The casual observer can be excused for being a bit confused by the on-going cable imbroglio at the FCC. Throw away your old-fashioned ideological assumptions about who should line up where — the players on this one have been as jumbled as a flight schedule on a holiday weekend. A Republican chairman of the FCC, with support from leftish activist groups and AT&T, is pushing for massive regulation. He is being challenged by fellow Republicans on the commission, as well as Republicans in Congress. Now comes one more voice against new cable regulation: Jesse Jackson’s.
That’s right. Jesse Jackson, the founder of the Rainbow Coalition, thinks FCC Chairman Kevin Martin is going too far:
“There is virtually no political support from either progressives or conservatives for such pet policies as a la carte pricing, which would raise prices for consumers and hurt most programmers, or for the various ‘leased-access’ programs that will squeeze out channel space for minority-owned programmers,” Jackson said in comments earlier this week.
“Rather than work through the democratic process in Congress, a bureaucratic agency should not be using a 20-year-old-legal clause to implement wholesale policy changes that hurt consumers and hurt minority television programmers.”
And he’s right. Despite the rhetoric, regulation isn’t the friend of diversity — it more often suppresses it than fosters it.
Welcome to the deregulatory coalition, Rev. Jackson. You can sit over there, where Mr. Martin used to sit.
One of the things I find most interesting about calls to regulate “excessively violent” content on television, in movies, or in video games is the way critics make massive leaps of logic and draw outrageous conclusions based on myopic, anecdotal reasoning. I was reminded of that again today when reading through an interview with Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va), one of the most vociferous critics of all sorts of media content and a long-time proponent of regulation to censor such violent content in particular (however it is defined). (I have written about his past regulatory proposals here and here).
Here’s what he recently told the editorial board of The Register-Herald of West Virginia:
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The outcome of yesterday’s hearing on an online dating bill
is succinctly captured by this AP news article headline: New Jersey concedes Internet dating plan,
yet pushes it anyway.
I want join James Gattuso in recommending that you read FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell’s outstanding speech on media policy issues that he delivered at a Media Institute event yesterday. I just want to highlight two of the myths he debunked in his speech, (myths which I had discussed in my 2005 book Media Myths: Making Sense of the Debate over Media Ownership):
Myth #1: The public has not been given a chance to be heard. As McDowell points out, no issue has been more thoroughly studied in the history of the FCC:
In my 17 years of being in and around the FCC, I can’t think of any issue that has been examined more thoroughly. I can’t remember any proceeding where the Commission has solicited as much comment and given the American people as much opportunity to be heard. If anyone knows of an FCC proceeding where there has been more opportunity for debate over an 11-year period, please let me know.
That’s exactly right, but the anti-media zealots like to propagate the myth that the public has somehow been frozen out of the process, or that important constituencies have not been heard from during these debates. It’s nonsense.
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Well, it won’t happen, but it would be a Good Thing nonetheless. Case in point: Commissioner McDowell took on the current chairman’s plans for regulation of the cable industry in remarks before the Media Institute yesterday, saying:
“I have a lot of questions that need answering.
Why is the FCC suddenly changing its evidentiary standard and methodology just for this one industry? How will this abrupt and radical departure affect other analyses and proceedings? Doesn’t this shift weaken arguments for updating the cross ownership ban? Does our proposed change affect our analysis of the proposed XM-Sirius merger? How do we reconcile decades of data showing more convergence and more competition among more delivery platforms with this sudden reversal? I am searching for credible answers to these and many other questions—thus far to no avail.”
He also defended the FCC’s moves to reform media ownership, ridiculing the idea that after 11 years of deliberation, it is rushing to judgment on this issue.
Good stuff.
Here’s the whole speech.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.