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Privacy advocates urge people who want to set up a personal health record online to read the fine print. Deven McGraw, director of the health privacy project at the Washington-based Center for Democracy and Technology, said sites like the Mayo Clinic Health Manager aren't currently covered by national laws that specify cases in which health care systems can access and share information without patients' consent.

"Open Government Data Principles Government data shall be considered open if it is made public in a way that complies with the principles below: 1. Complete All public data is made available. Public data is data that is not subject to valid privacy, security or privilege limitations. 2. Primary Data is as collected at the source, with the highest possible level of granularity, not in aggregate or modified forms. 3. Timely Data is made available as quickly as necessary to preserve the value of the data. 4. Accessible Data is available to the widest range of users for the widest range of purposes. 5. Machine processable Data is reasonably structured to allow automated processing. 6. Non-discriminatory Data is available to anyone, with no requirement of registration. 7. Non-proprietary Data is available in a format over which no entity has exclusive control. 8. License-free Data is not subject to any copyright, patent, trademark or trade secret regulation. Reasonable privacy, security and privilege restrictions may be allowed."

As the impact of digital advertising on consumer privacy comes under scrutiny, AT&T is taking a stance in support of stricter standards. In its testimony Thursday at a House subcommittee hearing on the issue, the telecommunications heavyweight is expected to advocate more transparency and consumer control in the fast-growing field of targeted ads.

According to department of telecom (DoT) sources, an inter-ministerial group meeting has been called on August 20 and will be attended by senior officials from DRDO, the Cabinet secretariat, security agencies, National Technical Research Organization (NTRO), Centre for Development of Telematics (C-DOT ) and DoT, to review the internet monitoring systems deployed nationwide by C-DOT . It seems there are new requests from the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI) and National Investigation Agency (NIA) for internet monitoring systems. Internet traffic in India is monitored at international internet gateways using C-DOT systems. Unlike mobile voice and data traffic, the government does not issue specific warrants for intercepting and monitoring messages on specific targets in case of internet services. The government has access to these through CDOT-deployed systems and can use them to access messages based on the needs of security agencies. Internet traffic monitoring also raises some serious issues of consumer privacy, because unlike mobile telephones , the operator has no role in carrying out specific interceptions.

Google Street View, the controversial website that shows 360-degree street views of many of Britain's cities does not breach the Data Protection Act, the information commissioner ruled today. Hundreds of people complained that their privacy was breached by the service, which launched last month for 25 cities and towns. Today the Information Commissioner's Office rejected those complaints but said it would watch Google closely to ensure that it responded quickly to requests for the removal of images that identified individuals.

"The Census Bureau has modified or suppressed some data on this site to protect confidentiality. Title 13 United States Code, Section 9, prohibits the Census Bureau from publishing results in which an individual's or business' data can be identified. The Census Bureau's internal Disclosure Review Board sets the confidentiality rules for all data releases. A checklist approach is used to ensure that all potential risks to the confidentiality of the data are considered and addressed. For more information on how the Census Bureau protects the confidentiality of data, please explore the following links."

Excellent article by Ruchi Gupta.

"A Supreme Court judge in New York City has given Google 15 days to provide the court with whatever identity information it has on commenter(s) that left a defamatory comments on YouTube videos of Columbia Business School grad and former actress and model Carla Franklin, including the word "whore"."

Consider three questions. How would one decide if there was too much telecommunications surveillance in the United States, or too little? How would one know if law enforcement was using its surveillance capabilities in the most effective fashion? How would one assess the impact of this collection of information on civil liberties? In answering these questions, a necessary step, the logical first move, would be to examine existing data about governmental surveillance practices and their results. One would also need to examine and understand how the legal system generated these statistics about telecommunications surveillance. Ideally, the information structure would generate data sets that would allow the three questions posed above to be answered. Light might also be shed on other basic issues, such as whether or not the amount of telecommunications surveillance was increasing or decreasing.

In this editorial, Paul M. Schwartz asks the question: "How can we know if law enforcement is using its surveillance capacities in the most effective fashion?" and points out that "neither the government nor outside experts know the basic facts about our surveillance practices." "Ideally, we would answer these questions by examining data about government surveillance practices and their results. Sadly, rational inquiry about telecommunications surveillance is prevented by the haphazard and incomplete information that the government collects about its own behavior."

Dan Solove's publications list. Links to all his SSRN articles.

"Where GoogleSharing Comes In GoogleSharing is a system that mixes the requests of many different users together, such that Google is not capable of telling what is coming from whom. GoogleSharing aims to do a few very specific things: Provide a system that will prevent Google from collecting information about you from services which don't require a login. Make this system completely transparent to the user. No special websites, no change to your work flow. Leave your non-Google traffic completely untouched, unredirected, and unaffected. The GoogleSharing system consists of a custom proxy and a Firefox Addon. The proxy works by generating a pool of GoogleSharing "identities," each of which contains a cookie issued by Google and an arbitrary User-Agent for one of several popular browsers. The Firefox Addon watches for requests to Google services from your browser, and when enabled will transparently redirect all of them (except for things like Gmail) to a GoogleSharing proxy. There your request is stripped of all identifying information and replaced with the information from a GoogleSharing identity. This "GoogleShared" request is then forwarded on to Google, and the response is proxied back to you. Your next request will get a different identity, and the one you were using before will be assigned to someone else. By "sharing" these identities, all of our traffic gets mixed together and is very difficult to analyze. The result is that you can transparently use Google search, images, maps, products, news, etc... without Google being able to track you by IP address, Cookie, or any other identifying HTTP headers. And only your Google traffic is redirected. Everything else from your browser goes directly to its destination. "

Google has banned subscribers to its Korean blogging platform, Textcube (www.textcube.org), from uploading songs onto their blogs, citing the country's new anti-file sharing provisions aimed at thwarting online piracy. This is the first time that the U.S. giant has disabled its bloggers from posting music files on their personal Web pages. Last month, Google blocked users from posting videos and comments on the Korean site of YouTube (kr.youtube.com), its online video service. This was to avoid the new regulations that mandate Internet users to make verifiable real-name registrations on all Web sites with more than 100,000 daily visitors, which means they have to submit their resident registration codes, the Korean equivalent of social security numbers.

London: "New regulations that came into force last week - requiring telephone and internet companies to keep logs of what numbers are called, and which websites and email services and internet telephony contacts are made - have left some wondering if investigative journalism, with its need to protect sources (and its sources' need, often, for protection), has been dealt a killer blow."

BERLIN (Reuters) - The German cabinet backed a new draft law Wednesday that would make it harder to access child pornography online and easier to prosecute those who use it. The bill will oblige Internet providers to block access to child porn sites by installing a "stop" sign when people try to enter them, the German ministries for justice, families and the economy said in a joint news conference.

TROY, N.Y. -- A former New York state tax department worker was accused of stealing the identities of thousands of taxpayers and running up more than $200,000 in fraudulent charges. Walter Healey gathered credit card, brokerage account and Social Security numbers that he used to open more than 90 credit card accounts and lines of credit between 2006 and 2008, prosecutors said.