Privacy Issues:
Making Privacy a Reality: The Safe Harbor Judgment and Its Consequences for US Surveillance Reform
Earlier this month, the Grand Chamber of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) issued its judgment in Schrems v. Data Protection Commissioner, in which it struck down the legal underpinnings of the EU-US Safe Harbor Agreement—the arrangement that enabled thousands of US companies to transfer EU users’ data to the US for processing and storage. Although the Court’s decision to invalidate the basis for Safe Harbor has placed a serious burden on transatlantic trade, the judgment makes clear and persuasive findings about the protections EU residents’ data must enjoy when transferred to the US. In doing so, it has provided a major impetus for reforms to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) – a law the NSA uses as the basis for some of the most egregious warrantless surveillance activities revealed by Edward Snowden, including PRISM and "upstream" collection.
Naturally, the CJEU cannot strike down US laws, nor did it seek to do so. In the absence of reforms to Section 702, however, any new data transfer agreements between the EU and the US are very likely to be invalidated by the Court. In order to avoid this and ensure that the US respects the human rights of people both within and outside its borders, Congress urgently needs to make thorough reforms to Section 702.
https://cdt.org/blog/making-privacy-a-reality-the-safe-harbor-judgment-and-its-consequences-for-us-surveillance-reform/.
The $24 Billion Data Business That Telcos Don’t Want to Talk About
U.K. grocer Morrisons, ad-buying behemoth GroupM and other marketers and agencies are testing never-before-available data from cellphone carriers that connects device location and other information with telcos’ real-world files on subscribers. Some services offer real-time heat maps showing the neighborhoods where store visitors go home at night, lists the sites they visited on mobile browsers recently and more.
Under the radar, Verizon, Sprint, Telefonica and other carriers have partnered with firms including SAP, IBM, HP and AirSage to manage, package and sell various levels of data to marketers and other clients. It’s all part of a push by the world’s largest phone operators to counteract diminishing subscriber growth through new business ventures that tap into the data that showers from consumers’ mobile web surfing, text messaging and phone calls. Insiders say phone carriers exploring data-sharing businesses are tight-lipped because they don’t want to reveal too many details to competitors, but fear of consumer complaints is always lurking in the background. "The practices that carriers have gotten into, the sheer volume of data and the promiscuity with which they’re revealing their customers’ data creates enormous risk for their businesses," said Peter Eckersley, chief computer scientist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy watchdog. Mr. Eckersley and others suggest that anonymization techniques are faulty in many cases because even information associated with a hashed or encrypted identification code can be linked back to a home address and potentially reidentified by hackers.
http://adage.com/article/datadriven-marketing/24-billion-data-business-telcos-discuss/301058/.
———————————-
Open Access:
Groundbreaking University of California policy extends free access to all scholarly articles written by UC employees
Today the University of California expands the reach of its research publications by issuing a Presidential Open Access Policy, allowing future scholarly articles authored by all UC employees to be freely shared with readers worldwide. Building on UC’s previously-adopted Academic Senate open access (OA) policies, this new policy enables the university system and associated national labs to provide unprecedented access to scholarly research authored by clinical faculty, lecturers, staff researchers, postdoctoral scholars, graduate students and librarians – just to name a few. Comprising ten campuses, five medical centers, and nearly 200,000 employees, the UC system is responsible for over 2% of the world’s total research publications. UC’s collective OA policies now cover more authors than any other institutional OA policy to date. The Presidential OA Policy represents the culmination of significant effort among UC faculty and staff to support increased access to their research publications, from the adoption of the first UC senate OA policy (UCSF) in 2012, to the establishment of the more comprehensive UC-wide Academic Senate policy in 2013. "Until now, tenure-track faculty have had the privilege of passing such policies to govern themselves, but at most universities, such faculty are a fraction of the people who do research and publish articles," explains Christopher Kelty, professor of Information Studies and Anthropology at UCLA and chair of the Presidential Open Access Policy Task Force. "Extending the same rights to those who aren’t part of a faculty governance system is an important and difficult step–I’m thrilled we have accomplished it."
http://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/2015/10/groundbreaking-presidential-oa-policy-covers-all-employees/.
———————————-
Internet Access:
Women’s Rights Online: Translating Access into Empowerment
New research by the Web Foundation shows that the dramatic spread of mobile phones is not enough to get women online, or to achieve empowerment of women through technology. The study, based on a survey of thousands of poor urban men and women across nine developing countries, found that while nearly all women and men own a phone, women are still nearly 50% less likely to access the Internet than men in the same communities, with Internet use reported by just 37% of women surveyed. Once online, women are 30-50% less likely than men to use the Internet to increase their income or participate in public life.
Lack of know-how and high cost are the two main barriers keeping women offline. Women are 1.6 times more likely than men to report lack of skills as a barrier to Internet use, while one gigabyte of data costs as much as 76% of monthly poverty line incomes in the countries in the study.
http://webfoundation.org/about/research/womens-rights-online-2015/.
———————————-
Social Media:
In Tracking Outbreaks Of Food Poisoning, Can Yelp Help?
When a Shigella outbreak at a San Jose, Calif. seafood restaurant sickened dozens of people last weekend, Yelp reviewers were on the case – right alongside public health officials. "PLEASE DO NOT EAT HERE!!!!" Pauline A. wrote in her Oct. 18 review of the Mariscos San Juan #3 restaurant. "My sister-in-law … and brother-in-law along with his parents ate here Friday night and all four of them ended up in the hospital with food poisoning!!!"
That same day, the Santa Clara County Public Health Department shut down the restaurant. Two days later, officials announced that more than 80 people who had eaten there had become acutely ill, with many requiring hospitalization. Twelve diners went to intensive care units.
Public health workers in New York, aided by Columbia University researchers, scanned thousands of Yelp reviews in 2012 and 2013 to find previously undetected food-borne illness, unearthing nearly 900 cases that were worthy of further investigation by epidemiologists. Ultimately, the researchers found three previously unreported restaurant-related outbreaks linked to 16 illnesses that would have merited a public health investigation if officials had known of them at the time. Follow-up inspections of the restaurants found food-handling violations.
http://khn.org/news/in-tracking-outbreaks-of-food-poisoning-can-yelp-help/.
———————————-
Public Policy:
New strategic bomber contract awarded after millions of dollars worth of lobbying
The U.S. Air Force has awarded an initial $21.4 billion contract for a new stealth bomber to be equipped with nuclear weapons, following years of ardent lobbying and generous campaign donations by the victorious military contractor, Northrop Grumman, to 224 key members of Congress. The firm’s task will be to construct at least 21 Long Range Strike bombers, Air Force Assistant Secretary William LaPlante announced at a late afternoon Pentagon press conference on Oct. 27. It will be the second largest military program in 14 years, exceeded only by the Joint Strike Fighter, manufactured by Lockheed Martin.
Lobbyists and officials at Northrop Grumman have spent years greasing the wheels on Capitol Hill to ensure congressional support for the program and for the firm’s central role in it, according to the Center for Public Integrity’s review of lobbying and campaign contributions by the contractor and its employees.
http://www.publicintegrity.org/node/18701.
———————————-
International Outlook:
Director of Ukrainian Library Detained in Moscow
Russian police on Thursday detained the director of a Ukrainian library in Moscow on suspicion of inciting ethnic hatred in the latest twist of the ongoing stand-off between the two nations. The Russian investigative committee said in a statement that it has asked a court to arrest 58-year old Natalya Sharina after the investigators found books in the library that allegedly disseminate "anti-Russian propaganda." The investigators said the library’s director is suspected of breaking the law on extremism since her library stocked books by nationalist activist Dmytro Korchynsky, which are banned in Russia.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/E/EU_RUSSIA_UKRAINE?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT.
Please feel free to pass along in part or in its entirety; attribution appreciated.
The Intersect Alert is a newsletter of the Government Relations Committee, San Francisco Bay Region Chapter, Special Libraries Association.