The Abstract from Designing the Personal Data Stream: Enabling Participatory Privacy in Mobile Personal Sensing by Katie Shilton, Jeffrey A. Burke, Deborah Estrin, Ramesh Govindan, Mark Hansen, Jerry Kang, and Min Mun: For decades, the Codes of Fair Information Practice have served as a model for data privacy, protecting personal information collected by governments and…
Category: Misc
Treatment of Alan Turing was “appalling” – PM
UK Prime Minister released a statement concerning the treatment of mathematician and code-breaker Alan Turing, who following WWII was convicted of a homosexual relationship and forced to choose between prison and chemical castration. Turing committed suicide two years later. In recent months, a public petition called upon the government to apologize for the way Turing…
Report card tracks the ebb and flow of secrecy
Steven Aftergood of FAS writes: The vast apparatus of government secrecy persisted through the last year with only limited changes in the contours of its multi-billion dollar operations, according to the latest “secrecy report card” published by Openthegovernment.org, a coalition of organizations working for increased transparency. The new report card (pdf), prepared by Patrice McDermott…
“Anonymized” data really isn’t—and here’s why not
Nate Anderson writes: The Massachusetts Group Insurance Commission had a bright idea back in the mid-1990s—it decided to release “anonymized” data on state employees that showed every single hospital visit. The goal was to help researchers, and the state spent time removing all obvious identifiers such as name, address, and Social Security number. But a…