To better understand issues that are not always easily answerable, sometimes we should be forced to examine the alternative opposing viewpoint no matter how benign or absurd. While it would seem hard to defend the NSA’s practice of mass collecting call detail records of non-suspect Americans as not violating the 4th Amendment rights under the […]
Happy Data Privacy Day 2013! To data privacy professionals and advocates, January 28th is an opportunity to create awareness and underscore the importance of how mission-critical data can affect our daily routine. In two separately released reports by “data” giants Google, Inc. and Twitter, Inc., both companies conclude that the U.S. government rarely establishes probable cause […]
Negotiations in the ongoing debate over how internet service companies, like Facebook, Inc., and Google, Inc., will be able to use personal information to track the browsing habits of its patrons have apparently hit a stalemate. Unless mediators between the Obama Administration, privacy advocate groups, and Internet industry firms can come to some sort of amiable […]
Ms. Patricia Ross, head of the mobile technology unit at the Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”), was quoted last week in The New York Times as urging mobile technology firms, who build applications for smartphones, to build security into their products from the beginning of development, not after a “privacy debacle” has occured. The direct message to the […]
Vivek Kundra’s tenure as the Nation’s first Chief Information Officer will likely be remembered for designating much of the federal government’s IT architecture towards cloud-based services. The former CIO’s vision has recently come under scrutiny by the two most prominent agencies within the U.S. government – the Pentagon and State Department. While the main selling point for cloud-based technology is cost […]