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“Today Microsoft is announcing that it has joined DataPortability.org, a group committed to advancing the conversation about the portability, security and privacy of individuals’ information online.  There are important security and privacy issues to solve as the internet evolves, and we are committed to being an integral part of the industry conversation on behalf of our users.

Chris Saad, cofounder and chair of the nonprofit ­DataPortability Project, notes that many current methods of transferring data expose users to huge security risks. For example, it's a common practice for social sites to ask users to submit the usernames and passwords for their Web-based e-mail accounts when they first sign up; an automated service can then search the network for people listed in their address books. "The door is open right now for any application that scrapes your Gmail address book to go ahead and scrape your shopping cart as well, or scrape your searches, or keep your username and password and pretend to be you," says Saad. "It's a nightmare of security, and it's something we need to solve sooner rather than later."

Who really owns your address book? Many Internet companies - like Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) and Yahoo (YHOO, Fortune 500) - say unequivocally that you do. If you sign up for free e-mail accounts on their services, you're free to take your friends with you and export your contact lists to any service that you like.

But Microsoft (MSFT, Fortune 500), while publicly embracing the idea of openness, has been saying something different behind the scenes. Since last summer, lawyers representing the company have been sending cease-and-desist letters to startups that offer new users the ability to import their Microsoft Hotmail contacts. In a move that Valley guys are deriding as ham-handed, Microsoft is offering a quid pro quo: Third-party sites can access Hotmail contacts if they make Microsoft's instant-messaging client available to their users - for 25 cents per user per year. Then the company says it will waive the fee if the sites make Messenger the exclusive in-network messaging client. Such a deal.

There is a better way, of course - though it remains to be seen whether it will work. A group of companies, aligned under the banner of the DataPortability Workgroup, is trying to craft standards that would make it easy for the data we collect online to move as freely and securely from one website to another as we do. As long as two sites abide by the DataPortability rules, they can effortlessly send anything back and forth between them - data, photos, address books. "It's safe, secure, painless," says Chris Saad, the Aussie who co-founded and chairs the DPW. Hundreds of individuals and several leading companies - including Yahoo, Facebook, Google, and even Microsoft - have signed on to the workgroup, and Saad says he's optimistic that we'll see a system in place later this year.

This regulation implements the provisions of M.G.L. c. 93H relative to the standards to be met by persons who own, license, store or maintain personal information about a resident of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.  This regulation establishes minimum standards to be met in connection with the safeguarding of personal information contained in both paper and electronic records.  Further purposes are to (i) ensure the security and confidentiality of such information in a manner consistent with industry standards, (ii) protect against anticipated threats or hazards to the security or integrity of such information, and (iii) protect against unauthorized access to or use of such information in a manner that creates a substantial risk of identity theft or fraud against such residents.

The first very simple implementations for the foaf+ssl protocol are now out: the first step in adding simple distributed security to the global open distributed decentralized social network that is emerging.

In this article we are going to be rather more practical, and less theoretical, but still too technical for the likes of many. I could spend a lot of time building a nice user interface to help make this blog a point and click experience. But we are not looking for point and click users now, but people who feel at home looking at some code, working with abstract security concepts, who can be critical and find solutions to problems too, and are willing to learn some new things. So I have simplified things as much as needs be for people who fall into that category (and made it easy enough for technical managers to follow too, I hope ).