The Yomiuri Shimbun reports: The Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry and the telecom and music industries plan to jointly introduce a system to prevent cell phone users from downloading illegally distributed music files to their cell phones via the Internet, it has been learned. The system, which could be operational as early as fiscal 2010,…
Copyright law threatening
Kris Kotarski has an op-ed in the Calgary Herald on copyright enforcement threatening privacy. He writes, in part: It is increasingly apparent that modern copyright law is utterly and completely incompatible with the right to privacy. This is at the core of the Pirate movement in Europe which broke through to elect its first members…
“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…
Lawmakers consider clampdown on the way Internet marketers collect personal data to target ads
Joelle Tessler of Associated Press reports on how Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va) is drafting a bill to impose restrictions on how web sites collect and use information for advertising services. Although the industry had proposed its own self-regulatory principles in July, a coalition of privacy groups submitted other recommendations to Congress that impose additional restrictions….