ghosts in the machine: Privacy

Showing posts with label Privacy. Show all posts

Monday, April 27, 2009

Lessons from the Identity Trail

"One uploaded photo, credit card number or status update at a time, we are relinquishing our privacy and anonymity." That's according to the results of a study on how society's use of information communication technologies impacts privacy and anonymity. University of Ottawa professor Ian Kerr and nearly two dozen researchers from across the globe spent four years examining the issue, ultimately determining that our anonymity and right to privacy is in jeopardy.

The results of their research have been published in a book, On the Identity Trail: Anonymity, Privacy and Identity in a Networked Society, which is available for free download online. Kerr also provides an overview in this CBC podcast, which aired on April 17, 2009.

Among the findings:

The researchers reported that governments are choosing laws that require people to identify themselves and are lowering judicial thresholds defining when identity information must be disclosed to law enforcement officials. That is allowing the wider use of new technologies capable of making people identifiable, including smartcards, security cameras, GPS, tracking cookies and DNA sequencing.

Consequently, governments and corporations are able to do things like:

Embrace technologies such as radio frequency identification tags that can be used to track people and merchandise to analyze behaviour.
Boost video surveillance in public places.
Pressure companies such as internet service providers to collect and maintain records of identification information about their customers.

While Canada, the U.K., the Netherlands and Italy all have national laws protecting privacy – that is, laws that allow citizens to control access to their personal data – such legal protection does not exist for anonymity.

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Ontario's Privacy Commissioner on RFID & EDLs: Podcast

This week's CBC "Search Engine" podcast explores the use of RFID technology in Canadian driver's licenses. Ontario Privacy Commissioner Ann Cavoukian shares her privacy concerns about enhanced drivers' licenses (EDLs) and discusses ways citizens who choose to use EDLs could protect their personal information from RFID skimmers when the cards are not in use. She emphasizes that use of EDLs is voluntary and expects on-off switch technology for the IDs to be ready in 2010.

Enhanced driver's licenses have been developed as a passport alternative for use when crossing the U.S. border. They are already in use in Manitoba and are set to launch in Ontario this June.

Thursday, February 12, 2009

Vancouver Olympics security raises privacy concerns

While the Vancouver 2010 Olympics have come under criticism for rapidly inflating costs, federal privacy commissioner Jennifer Stoddart is sounding the alarm about security plans for the winter event.

“Experience has shown that Olympic Games and other mega-events can leave a troubling legacy – large-scale, security surveillance systems installed for mega-events often remain long after the event is over,” she says. What happened following the Athens Games of 2004 is a case in point. Closed-circuit cameras installed for the Games were left in place afterwards to help law enforcement monitor citizens, notably during public demonstrations.

British Columbia’s privacy commissioner, David Loukadelis said last year that he had been assured by the RCMP the images from those cameras will be available only to key people. While using extraordinary measures to keep diplomats and athletes safe is reasonable for a special event he is concerned that once the Games are over, those cameras might remain and become a unreasonable infringement on everyday privacy rights.

Just as in Athens, following the Olympics in Sydney, many closed-circuit TV cameras were left in place after the Games.

Both Stoddart and Loukadelis have discussed security and privacy issues for the Games and will collaborate in monitoring security measures and privacy protections, in order to ensure that privacy rights are fully respected during the Games and after.

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Data Privacy Day 2009: Raising awareness

January 28th marks the 2nd annual international data privacy day in Canada, the U.S. and 27 European countries. The purpose of the event is to "raise awareness and generate discussion about data privacy practices and rights." It also serves the important purpose of furthering international collaboration and cooperation around privacy issues.

This year's data privacy day comes on the heels of what may have been the largest breach ever reported, with the personal information of nearly 100 million exposed at a U.S.-based credit card processing firm. Hackers breached the computer network at Heartland Payment Systems Inc., exposing customers' credit card numbers, card expiration dates and some internal bank codes - all information that could be used to forge a credit card. The company handles 100 million card transactions for 250,000 businesses nationwide each month.

The scale of the breach is “shocking,” says Jennifer Stoddart, Privacy Commissioner of Canada.

“After what we saw at TJX, that you could have such a major data breach, I'm asking myself what is happening and what is not getting through to organizations?” she says. “You should always take the steps to make sure there is suitable protection.”

As this most recent breach demonstrates, there is still much work to be done to raise awareness about data privacy.

Saturday, October 25, 2008

PIPEDA: Guidelines for Covert Video Surveillance

A manager at a railway company uses the zoom lens on cameras, installed for the purpose of monitoring train movements, to watch two employees leaving company property during regular working hours without permission.

An employee with a history of work-related injuries over a period of several years refuses to cooperate with his employer’s efforts to accommodate him or to provide current information to support his disability claim. His employer hires a private investigation firm to conduct covert video surveillance to observe the employee for a period of two weeks to determine if he indeed had the physical limitations he was claiming.

A transportation company hires a private investigation firm to conduct surveillance on an employee suspected of violating the company’s Conflict of Interest Policy by having a romantic relationship with a colleague. While the employee under investigation was the target of the surveillance, images were also covertly captured of the colleague and alleged romantic partner.

Which of the above scenarios are in violation of PIPEDA (Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act)? *

The Privacy Commissioner of Canada has prepared a draft guidance document that sets out good practice rules for private sector organizations that are either contemplating or using covert video surveillance.

The guidelines also include the test used by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner to determine whether an organization may properly rely on covert video surveillance:

1. The collection of personal information must only be for purposes that a reasonable person would consider appropriate in the circumstances.

2. There should be substantial evidence to support the suspicion that:

the relationship of trust between the organization and an individual has been broken;

there has been a breach of an agreement; or,

a law has been contravened.

3. Covert surveillance is a last resort and should only be contemplated if all other less privacy-invasive means of collecting personal information have been exhausted.

4. The collection of personal information must be limited to the stated purposes to the greatest extent possible.

Feedback on the draft guidance will be received until November 14, 2008. The Privacy Commissioner is particularly interested in comments from those directly affected by covert video surveillance, including unions representing employees of federally regulated organizations as well as consumer associations.

*Only the scenario in the first bullet was found to be in violation of PIPEDA.

Monday, October 13, 2008

Private eye Steve Rambam: Privacy is dead

Private investigator Steve Rambam has worked on a number of high-profile cases in his 25 year career, including tracking down Nazi war criminals in Canada. In a recent interview with Computerworld, Rambam discusses PallTech, his investigative database service with more than 25 billion records on U.S. citizens and businesses.

PallTech claims to have “ pretty much every American's name, address, date of birth, Social Security number, telephone number, personal relationships, businesses, motor vehicles, driver's licenses, bankruptcies, liens, judgments -- I could go on and on”

If the fact that PallTech has amassed this much specific information on almost every American isn’t troubling enough, there are two other disturbing issues raised in the interview. The first is the apparent lack of security or oversight of the sensitive data. When asked who has access to the data and how it is safeguarded, Rambam replies:

This is a database that's restricted to law enforcement, private investigators, security directors of companies and people who have a genuine need. … The most restrictive rule is my own personal ethics. In 20 years, we haven't had a single lawsuit or complaint.

The second troubling issue is how the data is being contributed:

The other thing is the mind-boggling level of self-contributed data. The average person now willingly puts on the Internet personal information about himself that 20 years ago people would hire an investigator to try and get. It's extraordinary. If you know how to use the Internet, 75% of an investigation can be conducted sitting in your pajamas.

Rambam feels that people have no reason to fear that PallTech will abuse their personal information, as they are “more accountable” than the US government: “You can sue us; you can subpoena us. You can hold us to task if we do something improper. Not so the U.S. government.”

Rambam is a proponent of public access to information, in order to prevent government abuse. In an earlier post, I mentioned David Brin’s book The Transparent Society , which discusses the illusion of privacy and advocates making most information available to everyone to ensure greater transparency and accountability.

Will information remain private and "secret", or are we on a path to making it open and public?

Tuesday, September 30, 2008

“Radical Pragmatism” : Privacy by design

Privacy protection must be built into new technologies right from inception, according to Ontario’s Privacy Commissioner, Ann Cavoukian.

In a paper she delivered yesterday at the University of Waterloo, entitled “Privacy and Radical Pragmatism: Change the Paradigm “, Cavoukian argues that enhancing surveillance and security in society does not need to be at the expense of privacy. Instead, Cavoukian advocates that "privacy-enhancing technologies" can be used to counter privacy-invading tools such as biometrics, RFID (radio-frequency identification tags) and video surveillance:

By adopting a positive-sum paradigm and applying a privacy-enhancing technology to an otherwise surveillance technology, you can develop, what I am now calling, a “Transformative Technology” – transformative because you can in effect, transform the privacy-invasive features of a given technology into privacy-protective ones. Among other things, transformative technologies can literally transform technologies normally associated with surveillance into ones that are no longer exclusively privacy-invasive in nature.

In an interview with IT World, David Fewer from CIPPIC says that a lot of work still needs to be done to get the private sector on-board:

Privacy enhancing technologies are often viewed as a cost by major corporations. It will likely be the role of statutes such as PIPEDA (Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act) and other … privacy laws to push companies toward investing in these privacy-enhancing technologies.

“As of now, industries will only be forced to do it when faced with an obligation to do so by regulators or when they make some kind of mistake in the marketplace and are forced to implement these technologies by some kind of legal action,” Fewer said.”

Image by Kevin Dooley

Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Google Responds to Privacy Concerns with Chrome

Google plans to anonymize the IP addresses and cookies that track users when they enter search terms or URLs into Google’s new browser, Chrome.

Privacy advocates have been concerned about the potential of the browser to allow Google even more ability to track users’ online habits and develop extensive user profiles.

Electronic Frontier Foundation technologist Peter Eckersley says: “We're worried that Chrome will be another giant conveyer belt moving private information about our use of the Web into Google's data vaults. Google already knows far too much about what everybody is thinking at any given moment."

Google also plans to anonymize user IP addresses nine months after they have been collected.

Regulators and policymakers have been scrutinizing Google’s privacy practices for the past year, and this seems to be yet another example of the company’s lack of attention to privacy and failure to fully disclose how data will be used.

Image by Randy Zhang

Saturday, August 23, 2008

Privacy Mode Planned for IE8

Internet Explorer 8, due for release later this year, will incorporate a private browsing feature. According to CNET, Microsoft registered two trademarks in July which point to privacy functionality in the browser - ClearTracks and Inprivate:

The Cleartracks trademark involves "computer programs for deleting search history after accessing Web sites," according to the Microsoft filing. And the Inprivate trademark involves "computer programs for disabling the history and file caching features of a Web browser; and computer software for notifying a user of a Web browser when others are tracking Web use and for controlling the information others can access about such use."

Mac's Safari already has a private browsing mode while Firefox's PrivateBrowsing is in development. With all three, private browsing is envisioned as a temporary mode, that users will need to switch on at times when they do not want to leave behind a search trail.

Photo by: Sunside

Monday, February 18, 2008

Canada's Privacy Commissioner on Social Networking

This video, from the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, Jennifer Stoddart, wants users of social networks to pause and ask themselves the following questions before posting personal information online:

What judgments or conclusions might others form with my information?
Are there some details about my life I would like to keep personal?
Who might view or purchase this information about me?
Will this information reflect well on me a year from now? Five years?
Would I want my best friend to know this?
Would I want my boss to know this?
Would I want my mom to know this?

For more information, visit the website of the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.

Sunday, February 10, 2008

Tracking Transience: Hasan Elahi's Life is an Open Book

In 2002, Hasan Elahi was detained at the Detroit airport when his name had mistakenly been added to the FBI’s terrorist watch list. An art professor at Rutgers University, it took six months of interrogation and nine lie detector tests before Elahi’s name was cleared.

In order to ensure that he wouldn’t be detained again, Elahi, a frequent traveller, began to routinely contact the FBI to advise them of his travel plans. He then decided to create Tracking Transience, a website where he uses time-stamped digital photos to track his own whereabouts. In addition to providing his location throughout the day by posting aerial photographs from Google Earth, he has uploaded his cell phone logs and even his bank statements to the site.

Why? Elahi’s intent is to explore the meaning of identity in an era of surveillance. While Tracking Transience robs him of his personal privacy, it also provides him with a running alibi, should he ever be falsely accused again. For his next project, he plans to post his own genome.

While Elahi’s website may seem radical, the reality is that many people are providing just as much personal information on the Internet in only slightly less overt ways. Whether twittering the details of your every waking moment, posting home videos onto MySpace, updating your Facebook status, paying your credit card online or making a purchase on E-Bay, all of these details could potentially be mined to form a clear picture of your identity.

Instead of looking over his shoulder and worrying that Big Brother is watching him, Elahi has placed himself under constant surveillance.

Photo by mikey_k on Flickr. Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 Generic

Saturday, January 26, 2008

January 28th is Data Privacy Day

The IAPP (International Association of Privacy Professionals) has declared January 28, 2008 "Data Privacy Day", in an effort to encourage privacy professionals to give presentations at schools, colleges and universities next week on the importance of privacy.

To assist privacy professionals in their goal, the IAPP is providing some free materials, including a slideshow and handouts on teens and social networking: worthwhile reading for many parents too!

If you're a privacy professional, educator or just concerened about privacy awareness, you may want to consider using these for your own presentation or as a springboard for discussion.

Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Facebook ordered to get tougher on privacy for children

In response to a spate of issues involving sexual predators using MySpace, Facebook began promoting itself as a safe online environment for children. To test their claims, investigators from the New York Attorney General’s office posed as teenagers and within a matter of days after posting their profiles on Facebook, had received numerous sexually suggestive messages from adults. Their complaints, registered using Facebook’s online form, went unanswered for weeks.

As a result of their investigation, New York state prosecutors accused Facebook of false advertising and the New York Times reports that yesterday, Facebook was ordered to immediately post stronger warnings about the risks to children using the site and to provide a quicker response to thousands of complaints daily about inappropriate sexual messages.

The changes are part of a settlement with the New York attorney general, Andrew M. Cuomo, whose office last month announced that it had been investigating whether the Web site misled users by promoting itself as a place where minors were safe from sexual predators.

Mr. Cuomo said the settlement would serve as a “new model” under which law enforcement and Internet companies could work together to protect children and recognize that they share responsibility to police illegal activity online.
By using consumer-protection laws to tackle the thorny problem of Internet safety, Mr. Cuomo appears to be building on the tactics of his predecessor, Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who used state laws to prosecute fraud on Wall Street.

“Any site where you are attracting young people, you must assume you are simultaneously attracting those who would prey on young people,” Mr. Cuomo said in an interview. “Whether you are a shoe company or you’re an Internet company, consumer protection laws apply.”

Chris Kelly, Facebook’s chief privacy officer, stood beside Mr. Cuomo to announce the deal and called the settlement part of the company’s effort to grow while maintaining users’ sense of safety and community. “We actually think we’ll end up attracting more people” because of the new measures, he said.

The settlement also requires Facebook to hire an independent company to track its responses to complaints and to report twice a year to Facebook and the attorney general.

In an earlier post, I expressed concern about Facebook’s default “wide-open” privacy settings and their announcement that profiles would be made available to third parties and eventually over the Internet using an automatic opt-in model. I complained to Facebook about this practice and my particular concern about the risks to minors. While their response was timely, coming within a few days of my original complaint, it completely skirted my concerns about using a negative opt-out, as well as the issue of putting children at risk:

We appreciate your feedback and will take it into consideration moving forward. Please keep in mind that a public search listing is simply a basic search result that allows people to know that you have a Facebook profile even if they do not yet use the site. Your public search listing will only be available if you allow “Everyone” to search for you on Facebook and have the “Allow anyone to see my public search listing” checkbox toggled on. You can adjust these settings from the Search section of the Privacy page.

Also note that people who do not yet use Facebook will not be able to interact with you or view your full information without registering with the site. Your public search listing will not affect any of your normal Search privacy settings. A non-Facebook user viewing your result would see the same search result if they registered with the site.

Your public search listing will also eventually appear in search engine indexes, making it even easier for your friends to connect with you. To change this option, please go to the Search section of the Privacy page and deselect the option to “Allow my public listing to be indexed by external search engines.”

By more efficiently connecting people, we hope that we can make your experience more meaningful on the site. Let me know if you have any further questions.

Thanks for contacting Facebook,

Kristjan
Customer Support Representative
Facebook

If Facebook truly cared about their users' privacy, and particularly the privacy of minors, their user profiles would default to allow maximum privacy, allowing users to choose to opt in to make their profiles available for searching on the Web. In light of these kinds of policies and their response to valid privacy concerns, it’s encouraging to see the privacy practices of social-networking sites like Facebook coming under closer scrutiny, particularly with respect to the safety of children.

Saturday, October 6, 2007

Homeland Security's Chertoff: more surveillance, less privacy

Americans are increasingly more willing to trade privacy for security, according to a recent Washington Post poll, and comments by Michael Chertoff, U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security at the International Data Protection and Privacy Commissioner's conference in Montreal earlier this week reflect this outlook.

Michael Geist reported on the BBC news site about Chertoff’s presentation at this year’s global privacy conference, where the theme was “Terra Incognita”, the latin term for unknown lands:

In a room full of privacy advocates, Chertoff came not with a peace offering, but rather a confrontational challenge.

He unapologetically made the case for greater surveillance in which governments collect an ever-increasing amount of data about their citizens in the name of security.

For example, in support of his security agenda, he noted that US forces in Iraq once gathered a single fingerprint from a steering wheel of a vehicle that was used in a bombing attack and matched it to one obtained years earlier at a US border crossing.

He added that there was a similar instance in England, where one fingerprint in a London home linked to a bombing was matched to a fingerprint gathered at a US airport (the identified person was actually innocent of wrongdoing, however).

Chertoff explained that in the autumn the US intends to expand its fingerprinting collection program by requiring all non-Canadians entering his country to provide prints of all ten fingers (it currently requires two fingerprints).

In the process, his vision of a broad surveillance society - supported by massive databases of biometric data collected from hundreds of millions of people - presented a chilling future. Rather than terra incognita, Chertoff seemed to say there is a known reality about our future course and there is little that the privacy community can do about it.

David Brin’s book The Transparent Society discusses the illusion of privacy and advocates making most information available to everyone to ensure greater transparency and accountability. Security does seem to be prevailing over privacy, and, ironically, greater openness is regarded as the means to safeguard personal liberties. It’s a frightening prospect in many ways, but perhaps a more palatable option than the current move to consolidate information into the hands of government, corporations, the military or police.

Chertoff's observations are provocative and may lead our privacy commissioners to shift the debate from "privacy versus security" to focus more on issues of accountability and oversight.

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

2020: The future of surveillance

Imagine a world where …

- every single one of your activities outside your home was monitored on closed-circuit cameras

- your computer’s ip address was fixed, allowing anyone to track your activity and making your computer a hot property for thieves wanting to hide their identity

- all monetary currency has disappeared and your electronic transactions are all tracked, unless you pay extra to "scrub" your transaction

- you will be required by law to wear an identity transponder at all times so that you can be readily identified

- your insurance company is able to monitor the groceries you buy and what you consume in a restaurant in order to charge higher rates to subscribers who eat junk foods

These are just some of the predictions forecast in DM News by Robert Gellman, a Washington-based privacy and information policy consultant and former chief counsel to the U.S. House subcommittee on information, justice, transportation and agriculture.

2020 is just 13 years away – how close are we to living in the world that Gellman predicts?

Photo by: Gavin Stewart, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0

Thursday, September 6, 2007

Facebook uses negative opt-out to make profiles public

Facebook users received notifications this week that the company is planning to make user profiles available to non-users and eventually make them searchable on the Internet, as reported today by the BBC:

The function will initially allow anyone who is not registered with the site to search for a specific person. More controversially, in a month's time, the feature will also allow people to track down Facebook members via search engines such as Google.

The firm said that the information being revealed is minimal.

… The public search listing will show the thumbnail picture of a Facebook member from their profile page as well as links allowing people to interact with them. But, in order to add someone as a friend or send them a message, the person will have to be registered with Facebook.

Users who want to restrict what information is available to the public or
opt out of the feature altogether can change their privacy settings. They have a
month to do so.

Facebook originated as a “closed” space, targeting university and college students whose e-mail addresses had to originate from their academic institution’s domain. Last year, Facebook opened its service to anyone, but part of the appeal to users is the ability to restrict access to your profile within the Facebook environment.

Now, Facebook is pulling down the walls of their environment and allowing anyone, anywhere to see its users’ profiles – unless users choose to opt out. The negative opt-out technique means that if users do not respond, Facebook will assume they have granted permission for their profiles to be made public.

Roger’s Cable in Canada tried the negative option technique in the mid-90’s, delivering a package of new speciality services with automatic increased costs to customers’ bills. Customers were outraged, the company backed away from their plan and by 1999, Canadian parliament outlawed the practice.

The negative opt-out is at best unfair and at worst a huge violation of trust:

It presumes that everyone will read the opt-out notification within the month – there are purportedly 39 million Facebook accounts, a large percentage of which have likely become inactive or are used infrequently, so those users’ information will probably go public without their knowledge or consent.

It takes advantage of a low response rate. Studies have shown that only about 15% of users will respond to a negative opt-out. Facebook stands to make a greater profit using this method than requiring users to opt in.

It takes advantage of the relationship developed between service provider and customer. Facebook is presuming that it can use its customers’ information in whichever way it deems fit, with a minimum of input from users.

It puts users – including minors – at risk by exposing their profile information to the wider world. Many Facebook users are not well-informed about the myriad of privacy settings required to lock down one’s profile. Many users leave their entire profile, including date of birth, workplace, residential neighbourhood and status (e.g. “I’m vacationing in Aruba all week!”) open to entire networks of thousands of members to view. While users’ entire profiles will not be available to search on the Web - not yet, anyway – it opens the door for greater abuse.

In using the negative opt-out technique, Facebook is violating the trust and the privacy of millions of loyal users. If users and regulators allow Facebook to proceed with this tactic - what's next? What other web services do you use that may decide to share your personal information or web history with a third party, assuming that your silence to a negative option grants them your "permission"?

Monday, August 27, 2007

This is Privacy Awareness Week

Privacy Awareness Week is a promotional campaign first initiated by Privacy Victoria (Australia) in 2001. This year, for the first time, Privacy Awareness Week has gone international.

The week is an opportunity for organizations and agencies covered by privacy legislation to promote privacy awareness to their staff, customers, and to the wider community. The theme for Privacy Awareness Week 2007 is ‘Privacy is your business'.

Do you know your rights and obligations with respect to privacy? Organizations, governments, and government agencies in many countries are bound by a variety of privacy laws. As consumers, each of us is responsible to understand what our rights and responsibilities are under those laws.

Learn more about your rights!

International: Privacy International and Electronic Frontier Foundation

In the U.S.: Office of Information and Privacy, U.S. Department of Justice and American Civil Liberties Union

In Canada: Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada and CAPAPA

In the U.K.: Information Commissioner's Office

In Australia: Privacy Victoria

Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Andrew Feldmar on the Colbert Report

Back in April, I wrote about Canadian researcher Andrew Feldmar, who was held at the border and subsequently barred from entry into the U.S. because a border guard googled his name and discovered he'd tried LSD in the name of scholarly research over 30 years ago.

Last night, the Colbert Report submitted a "Nailed 'em" report on Feldmar's story, which you can view today on the show's website. Today, the Tyee published an account by Feldmar's son about filming the episode, which in typical Colbert style points out the lunacy behind a policy that would bar from entry into the U.S. a respected researcher who has never been charged or convicted of a criminal offense.

Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Ask.com and Microsoft call for privacy standards

According to PC World, Ask.com will be the first major search engine to offer an anonymous searching option to users. Their new AskEraser feature will give users the option to request that their search data not be stored.

This is in stark contrast to Google’s recent announcement that they will reduce the time they save search data from over 30 years to “only” two years. In spite of Google’s voluntary reduction in cookie life, European privacy experts, among others, have soundly criticized the lifespan of Google’s cookies:

"Compared to the previous lifetime of 30 years, the period of two years seems to be short," Schaar wrote in an email. "But from a data-protection perspective, and considering the fact that the user's search behaviour is recorded and can be analysed for any purposes, this period is still too long."

Meanwhile, Microsoft has joined Ask.com in calling on technology leaders to find a way to meet their need for advertising data without compromising user privacy:

"The first step is, we'll be in contact with all the other players in this space and talk about what a summit might look like," said Cullen. "We're very happy to host it, if that's the answer ... both Microsoft and Ask.com think that this is the time to make this happen."

Microsoft is planning to allow users to opt out of having their search data used to generate targeted advertising on Microsoft's Web sites, and under a new privacy policy, plans to scrub all search query data of any user-identifiable information after 18 months. While this is in part a shot at Google, it is encouraging to see some leadership within the industry to safeguard the privacy of their users’ search data.

The ability to search anonymously is essential in allowing individuals to explore any area of inquiry without fear of discovery or retribution. When companies track user data, their primary motivation is to inform their decisions about advertising. The abuse of search data has additional implications if the data is merged with that of advertisers, as I wrote in an earlier post about the proposed Google and DoubleClick merger.

When search data is breached, the consequences could be far more serious than mere embarassment. About a year ago, AOL inadvertently released the search data for about 650,000 searches on their site and New York Times reporters were actually able to identify one of the searchers. Breaches of this magnitude and specificity could ruin careers and reputations, while creating a chilling effect on the exploration and sharing of ideas over the Internet.

Google needs to stop hedging on privacy and get on board with this initiative.

Tuesday, July 3, 2007

Privacy Rights and Terror Investigations

Two recent developments on the international cooperation front provide some redress to concerns about privacy and information-sharing between governments. The introduction of no-fly lists in the U.S., Canada and the E.U., as well as the increasingly globalised nature of personal information in data banks has raised questions about how this information will be shared with and used by foreign governments.

A tragic example of the failure to provide protection to citizens in these areas is the story of Maher Arar, a story familiar to most Canadians:

Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian citizen was detained during a layover at John F. Kennedy International Airport in September 2002 on his way home to his family in Canada. He was held in solitary confinement in the U.S. for nearly two weeks, interrogated, and denied meaningful access to a lawyer. The Bush administration labeled him a member of Al Qaeda and rendered him, not to Canada, his home and country of citizenship, but to Syrian intelligence authorities, known by the U.S. government to practice torture.While in Syria, he was regularly tortured for almost a year before being released to Canada. Both the Canadian and Syrian governments have publicly cleared Arar of any links to terrorism. The United States government, however, refuses to clear Arar’s name and continues to have both him and his family on a watchlist.

Mr. Arar’s incarceration was the result, in part, of misleading information provided by the RCMP, which eventually led to the resignation of the RCMP commissioner. Following Mr. Arar’s return to Canada, there were several intentional disclosures to the public from his file, which appeared to be made in order to justify the actions of the security agencies involved. These disclosures were in violation of Mr. Arar’s privacy rights.

In our increasingly globalised economy, the volume of personal data crossing borders represents a growing threat to personal privacy. In an effort to counter the threat, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has issued a report proposing amendments to data privacy legislation as well as enhancements to international cooperation in the field of privacy protection:

When personal information moves across borders it may put at increased risk the
ability of individuals to exercise privacy rights to protect themselves from the
unlawful use or disclosure of that information. At the same time, the authorities charged with enforcing privacy laws may find that they are unable to pursue complaints or conduct investigations relating to the activities of organisations outside their borders. Their efforts to work together in the cross-border context may also be hampered by insufficient preventative or remedial powers, inconsistent legal regimes, and practical obstacles like resource constraints. In this context, a consensus has emerged on the need to promote closer co-operation among privacy law enforcement authorities to help them exchange information and carry out investigations with their foreign counterparts.

While most OECD member countries have enacted privacy legislation, Canada's Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddard has pointed out that different rules in different countries were not only causing unease among citizens and companies, but were also leading to more red tape and higher costs.

Meanwhile, The European Union and the U.S. have reached a provisional deal on exchanging information about transatlantic air passengers. According to a TechWorld News story, the U.S. will be required to adhere to "strict data retention obligations," including retaining both used and unused data for no more than five years.

The United States and European Union share views on combating terrorism but
"these activities should be done in full respect for fundamental rights," said
Franco Frattini, the EU's justice and home affairs commissioner.

While privacy protections need to go even further than these two initiatives, it is encouraging to see some developments that attempt to preserve individual privacy rights and hopefully prevent a recurrence of the nightmare that Maher Arar experienced.