Chris Walters writes: Senator Charles Schumer is upset on your behalf over Facebook’s latest loosening of its privacy policies, and yesterday he called for the FTC to step in and provide some guidance, offering to introduce legislation if the agency feels it needs that extra authority. Specifically, Schumer wants three things: opt-out defaults should be…
Category: Govt
Justice Department plans to expand cops’ access to data
Ben Bain reports: The Justice Department plans to have a nationwide program to allow law enforcement officials from participating agencies to access data on each other’s unclassified systems, a senior department technology official said today. Jeremy Warren, Justice’s chief technology officer, said the program would use a federated identity management approach to let officials use…
Facebook steps up lobbying, deepens ties with intelligence agencies, FTC
Kim-Mai Cutler writes: Facebook has been gradually boosting its profile in Washington D.C. over the past year and is on the hunt for a second senior lobbyist to add to its office of four. Disclosures released a few days ago show that, on top of lobbying the usual suspects Internet companies reach out to like…
Internet privacy under inspection by Commerce Department
Ellen Messmer reports: The U.S. Commerce Department Wednesday kicked off an initiative to take a close look at how the privacy of individuals is impacted broadly in the Internet economy with the goal of providing advice to the White House on how both the president and government policymakers might regard the topic. “Because of the…