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The European Commission started legal action against Britain on Tuesday for what the EU executive called a failure to keep people's online details confidential. EU Telecoms Commissioner Viviane Reding said the action related to how Internet service providers used Phorm (PHOR.L) technology to send subscribers tailor-made advertisements based on websites visited. Reding said Internet users in Britain had complained about the way the UK applied EU rules on privacy and electronic communications that were meant to prohibit interception and surveillance without the user's consent. "Technologies like Internet behavioural advertising can be useful for businesses and consumers but they must be used in a way that complies with EU rules," Reding said in a statement. "We have been following the Phorm case for some time and have concluded that there are problems in the way the UK has implemented parts of the EU rules on the confidentiality of communications," Reding said. She called on Britain to change its national laws to ensure there were proper sanctions to enforce EU confidentiality rules. Unless Britain complies, Reding has the power to issue a final warning before taking the country to the 27-nation EU's top court, the European Court of Justice. If it rules in favour of the European Commission, the court can force Britain to change its laws. (Reporting by Huw Jones, editing by Dale Hudson)

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A data protection group has warned that opting out of Phorm will not prevent the technology from processing data that users enter through web site search portals. Companies such as Amazon, Wikipedia and LiveJournal have taken the decision to block the controversial advertising technology from scanning their sites because of the privacy implications. However, Open Rights Group executive director Jim Killock has since admitted that, even if web sites opt out of the programme, ISPs supporting Phorm will still be able to profile users visiting those sites. "This is because Phorm can scan search requests entered in those sites, even if it cannot detect the web site pages users are viewing," Killock said. "For example, even if Google opts out of Webwise, when a user types in a Google query and they are using BT, it will still go through Phorm before it reaches BT." Killock added that Phorm does not gain permission from either senders or receivers of the information before it processes the data. Phorm uses browsing information to serve accurately targeted advertisements, and is soon to be rolled out under the Webwise brand by internet service providers BT, Virgin Media and TalkTalk. However, as the time for deployment nears, the controversy surrounding the technology only seems to be increasing.

eBook: Compliance 2.0: Comprehensive, Scalable and Sustainable Systems http://go.techtarget.com/r/6705298/226727/1 Enterprises are moving towards a top-down approach to compliance that starts with risk assessment and prioritization, experts agree. In this expert e-book gain insight from senior IT and security officers who are taking a holistic approach to compliance for long-term sustainability and cost reduction. Learn which quantitative tools you can use to prioritize your efforts, maximize your investments and get key business executives to support your next project. Learn how to: ** Bring your data into governance ** Understand and manage your risk exposure ** Get the right people on board to support your strategy and policies Start building your true compliance infrastructure: http://go.techtarget.com/r/6705299/226727/2

An eBay Inc. effort to broaden communication through the popular Twitter Web-messaging service highlights the hurdles facing corporate users of online social media. The growing Twitter audience also attracted the attention of eBay's lawyers, who last month required Mr. Brewer-Hay to include regulatory disclaimers with certain posts. Some followers think the tougher oversight is squelching Mr. Brewer-Hay's spontaneous, informal style. His experience shows the tension that can arise as more companies tap social media to reach investors, customers and others. Eighty-one Fortune 500 companies sponsor public blogs, including Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Chevron Corp. and General Motors Corp., according to the Society for New Communications Research. Of those blogs, 23 link to corporate Twitter accounts. On Thursday, a Johnson & Johnson executive reported for the first time on the health-care giant's annual meeting via Twitter, which allows users to post "tweets" of as many as 140 characters via text messages and the Web. Such efforts raise thorny questions. Blogs and tweets can run afoul of Securities and Exchange Commission regulations on corporate communications. But sanitizing such posts risks hurting credibility with online audiences. The online auctioneer launched a corporate blog in April 2008. Two months later, blogger Richard Brewer-Hay began "tweeting" -- posting updates on Twitter -- about Silicon Valley technology conferences, eBay's quarterly earnings calls and other topics.

A typical lost or stolen laptop costs employers $49,246, mostly due to the value of the missing intellectual property or other sensitive data, according to an Intel-commissioned study made public Wednesday. "It is the information age, and employees are carrying more information on their laptops than ever before," according to an analysis done for Intel by the Michigan-based Ponemon Institute, which studies organizational data-management practices. "With each lost laptop there is the risk that sensitive data about customers, employees and business operations will end up in the wrong hands." The five-month study examined 138 laptop-loss cases suffered over a recent 12-month period by 29 organizations, mostly businesses but also a few government agencies. It said laptops frequently are lost or stolen at airports, conferences and in taxis, rental cars and hotels. About 80 percent of the typical cost - or a little more than $39,000 - was attributed to what the report called a data breach, which can involve everything from hard-to-replace company information to data on individuals. Companies then often incur major expenses to prevent others from misusing the data. Lost intellectual property added nearly $5,000 more to the average cost. The rest of the estimated expense was associated with such things as investigative costs, lost productivity and replacing the laptop. Larry Ponemon, the institute's chairman and Advertisement founder, said he came up with the cost figure based on his discussions with the employers who lost the laptops. When he later shared his findings with the companies and government agencies, he said, some of their executives expressed surprise at the size of the average loss. But he noted that one of the employers thought the amount could have been even higher.

European Union's move indicates growing government concern over how Internet companies are using individuals' private data The European Commission began legal action against the U.K. Tuesday over its failure to protect Internet users from Phorm -- a covert behavioral advertising technology tested by the U.K.'s biggest fixed line operator, BT, in 2006 and 2007. The move signals growing concern in Brussels over the way new Internet-based technologies are using people's personal data. In addition to taking legal action against the U.K., the Commission also issued a general warning to all 27 E.U. countries to uphold privacy laws, especially regarding social-networking Web sites and users of RFID (radio frequency identification) technologies. In Canada, the federal government has even proposed a legislation that will provide law enforcement agents sweeping powers to obtain user information from ISPs. The Commission, the executive body of the European Union responsible for upholding laws, said the U.K. had failed to enforce E.U. data protection and privacy rules, because broadband Internet subscribers were not informed that their browsing was being tracked.

Cable operators will sit in the hot seat Thursday as Congress reviews their plans to roll out targeted advertising amid fears that consumer privacy could be infringed if the companies were to track and record viewing habits. The House subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet will hold a hearing that will look at new uses for digital set-top boxes, the devices that control channels and perform other tasks on the TV screen. Cable TV companies plan to use such boxes to collect data and direct ads more targeted to individual preferences. "We have recently called on Congress and the Federal Trade Commission to investigate cable's new interactive targeted TV ad system on both antitrust and privacy grounds," said Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy. He's concerned about Canoe Ventures, a consortium formed by the nation's six largest cable companies to oversee the rollout of targeted and interactive ads nationally. Chester worries that Canoe will track what consumers do in their homes. Currently, cable companies aim their ads based strictly on geography. Now, cable's goal is to take the Internet's success with targeted ads and transfer that to the TV medium. Thus, a household that watches a lot of Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel eventually could be targeted for theme parks promotions. This type of targeting is something broadcast TV can't do. For starters, Canoe plans to offer ads this summer that consider demographic factors such as age and income. Philadelphia-based Comcast Corp. and Cablevision Systems Corp. of Bethpage, N.Y., also have been testing or rolling out targeted ads outside the consortium. But cable operators are wary about being seen as trampling on consumer privacy and reiterate that they don't plan to target based on any personally identifiable information, such as someone's name and address. Canoe said it doesn't have plans this year to use set-top box data for ads. Instead, the first ads it pl

Last week, the government took another step toward closing a legal loophole in federal privacy and security rules for emerging Health 2.0 information technology applications by issuing proposed rules aimed at covering an estimated 900 companies and organizations offering personal health records and electronic systems connected to them. The Federal Trade Commission was careful to point out its new interim proposed rule on federal breach notification requirements for the developers of electronic PHR systems did not apply to covered organizations or their business associates as defined by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, heretofore the key federal privacy and security regulation. The FTC, operating under new authority given it by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, noted that its new rule seeks to cover previously unregulated entities that are part of a Health 2.0 product mix. FTC staff estimates that about 200 PHR vendors, another 500 related entities and 200 third-party service providers will be subject to the new breach notification rule. The staffers estimate that the 900 affected companies and organizations, on average, will experience 11 breaches each per year at a total cost of about $1 million per group, per year. Costs include investigating the breach, notifying consumers and establishing toll-free numbers for explaining the breaches and providing additional information to consumers. Pam Dixon, founder and executive director of the World Privacy Forum, said that this isn't the first involvement of the FTC in healthcare-related regulation, noting the consumer protection agency joined with the Food and Drug Administration in a joint statement on the marketing of direct-to-consumer genetic tests. The FTC also has worked in the field of healthcare competition. She noted the compliance deadline with the FTC's "red flag rules" on provider organizations that provide consumer credit to patients for installment payment

For most insurers, business intelligence means point solutions at best. But those carriers that weave analytics into the fabric of their organizations are equipped to drive more precision in pricing and greater profitability to the bottom line. For businesses that run on the analysis of information, insurers have proven notably reluctant to apply business intelligence (BI) and analytic technologies to risk management at both the corporate strategic level and in the front lines of underwriting. For a variety of reasons, enterprise risk management (ERM) solutions have been talked about far more than implemented, and BI and predictive analytics generally have been applied haphazardly or piecemeal, if at all. The financial crisis, however, has heightened interest in risk management technologies, owing to senior executives' fears of disastrous overexposure to risk. Their concerns are legitimate, but for insurance more than any other financial services sector, risk also is opportunity, and BI should be utilized more as a competitive weapon than a defensive shield. As insurance has become commoditized and investment returns have become less reliable, carriers' ability to more precisely analyze and underwrite risks can be a key source of competitive differentiation.

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Rarely is the response to a new government initiative a unanimous round of "thumbs up," but so far that seems to be the case regarding yesterday's (April 9) announcement that The Defense Department and the Department of Veterans Affairs will collaborate on building an electronic database of administrative and medical information for U.S. servicemen and women. Since developing a broad electronic health records (EHRs) initiative is a prominent feature of the Obama Administration's economic stimulus plan, it makes sense to start (or at least focus) on a defined segment of the population -- current and past military personnel. But, apart from the specific technology, architecture and technical administration aspects of this program, there will be other challenges in pursuing the goal of EHRs for the military -- challenges that insurance technology executives know only too well. These include collaboration among different and sometimes competing interests (in this case, the Department of Defense (DOD) and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), which historically have not worked together as closely as one might imagine); and concerns about privacy and security. In fact, the ways in which the military EHRs initiative addresses the privacy issue could provide some interesting best practices (or actions to avoid) for private-sector players. "Currently, there is no comprehensive system in place that allows for a streamlined transition of health records between DOD and the VA," President Barack Obama said at yesterday's announcement, "and that results in extraordinary hardship for an awful lot of veterans who end up finding their records lost, unable to get their benefits processed in a timely fashion. And that's why I'm asking both departments to work together to define and build a seamless system of integration with a simple goal: When a member of the Armed Forces separates from the military, he or she will no longer have to walk paperwork from a DOD

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Former Booz Allen Hamilton management consultant Melissa Hathaway's much anticipated 60-day review of U.S. cybersecurity policy is scheduled to hit President Obama's desk this Friday. All eyes of the tech security community will be watching. It will signal what approach Obama will take in the complicated task of stemming cyber threats. Obama has said he will make the Internet safer for citizens and businesses, while playing catchup to China and Russia who are far ahead in the cyberwarfare arms race. "We're trying to do cybersecurity in a democracy," says Leslie Harris, President and CEO of the Center for Democracy & Technology. "Doing cybersecurity in China, my guess, is a lot easier." CDT held a press briefing this morning at which it warned that a cybersecurity bill, introduced earlier this month by Sen. John Rockefeller, D-W.Va, and Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, is the first of several that likely will be proposed once Hathaway's review is out. Harris said CDT agrees with a provision in the Rockefeller-Snowe bill that would create a cabinet-level cybersecurity adviser reporting directly to President Obama, but questions some of the extraordinary federal enforcement powers that could be created. CDT says it doesn't want citizens' civil liberties trampled upon. CDT general counsel Greg Nojeim gave Hathaway high marks for keeping her review process relatively open, in contrast to the Bush administration's penchant for secrecy. "So far the White House review team gets high grades on transparency," Nojeim said. Hathaway has held closed briefings in the past several weeks with Congressional committees, industry groups and privacy organizations, said Nojeim. "But the real test will be whether their recommendations reflect a commitment to transparency in the execution of the program," said Nojeim.

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As health care providers determine how they will take advantage of the $19 billion allocated in the stimulus package to help jumpstart advances in health information technology (HIT), consumer appetite for electronic health records (EHRs), online tools and services is also growing, according to the results of the 2009 Deloitte Survey of Health Care Consumers (www.deloitte.com/us/2009consumersurvey). While only 9 percent of consumers surveyed have an electronic personal health record (PHR), 42 percent are interested in establishing PHRs connected online to their physicians. Fifty-five percent want the ability to communicate with their doctor via email to exchange health information and get answers to questions. Fifty-seven percent reported they'd be interested in scheduling appointments, buying prescriptions and completing other transactions online if their information is protected. Technologies that can facilitate consumer transactions with providers and health plans, like integrated billing systems that make bill payment faster and more convenient, are also appealing to nearly half (47 percent) of consumers surveyed. The survey of more than 4,000 U.S. consumers 18 and over was released today at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Annual Conference held in Chicago. It is the second annual study examining health care consumers' attitudes, behaviors and unmet needs conducted by the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions offering health care industry leaders and policymakers a timely look at how health care consumerism is evolving. "Consumers are increasingly embracing innovations that enhance self-care, convenience, personalization and control of personal health information," said Paul H. Keckley, Ph.D., executive director, Deloitte Center for Health Solutions. "Consumers want a bigger say in their health care decisions. Consumer demand for HIT and its potential impact on reforming the system has never been stronger." Despite strong con

At first glance, Chicago's latest crime-fighting strategy seems to be plucked from a Hollywood screenplay. Someone sees a thief dipping into a Salvation Army kettle in a crowd of shoppers on State Street and dials 911 from a cellphone. Within seconds, a video image of the caller's location is beamed onto a dispatcher's computer screen. An officer arrives and by police radio is directed to the suspect, whose description and precise location are conveyed by the dispatcher watching the video, leading to a quick arrest. That chain of events actually happened in the Loop in December, said Ray Orozco, the executive director of the Chicago Office of Emergency Management and Communications. "We can now immediately take a look at the crime scene if the 911 caller is in a location within 150 feet of one of our surveillance cameras, even before the first responders arrive," Mr. Orozco said. The technology, a computer-aided dispatch system, was paid for with a $6 million grant from the Department of Homeland Security. It has been in use since a trial run in December. "One of the best tools any big city can have is visual indicators like cameras, which can help save lives," Mr. Orozco said. In addition to the city's camera network, Mr. Orozco said, the new system can also connect to cameras at private sites like tourist attractions, office buildings and university campuses. Twenty private companies have agreed to take part in the program, a spokeswoman for Mr. Orozco said, and 17 more are expected to be added soon. Citing security concerns, the city would not say how many cameras were in the system. Mayor Richard M. Daley said this week that the integrated camera network would enhance regional security as well as fight street crime. Still, opponents of Mr. Daley's use of public surveillance cameras described the new system as a potential Big Brother intrusion on privacy rights. "If a 911 caller reports that someone left a backpack on the sidewalk, wil

A Microsoft-led group set up three years ago has backed away from its original goal of pushing for comprehensive U.S. privacy legislation. Originally, the Consumer Privacy Legislative Forum was set up to bring a diverse array of consumer companies, technology vendors and even advocacy groups together and help drive privacy legislation. But now the group has been renamed the Business Forum for Consumer Privacy and is instead being billed as "an organization focused on fostering innovation in consumer privacy governance," according to the group's new mission statement. The Forum has released a white paper at the International Association of Privacy Professionals conference held in Washington this week. "What the organization is doing is developing the framework that would make new governance possible," said Martin Abrams, an adviser to the Forum who is executive director with the Centre for Information Policy Leadership at Hunton & Williams, an international law firm. Two of the Forum's original members, Symantec and the Center for Democracy and Technology, say they have dropped out. Eastman Kodak has also dropped out, according to Abrams. He was not authorized to say who the current members are, but the group appears to include Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, eBay and Google. U.S. consumers are covered by a patchwork of state and federal laws that are confusing for companies, and which often force consumers to work hard to protect their own data. Many of the Forum's members would like to change things, but it appears that coming up with legislative proposals was too much.

With so many workers being axed, the threat to sensitive customer, corporate, military information should be examined. Once workers leave with sensitive information, good luck controlling exposure. Cross International borders and the issue potentially expands into an national "incident" with dire consequences for corporate reputation. Protectionism vs Patriotism. Issues raised in the Great Depression revisited with more impact due to expansion of the economy to global status.

Microsoft Corp.'s plan to eliminate U.S. workers after lobbying for more foreigner visas is stirring resentment among lawmakers and employees. As many as 5,000 employees are being shown the door at Microsoft, which uses more H1-B guest-worker visas than any other U.S. company. Some employees and politicians say Microsoft should get rid of foreigners first. "If they lay people off, are they going to think of America first or are they going to think of the world first?" Chuck Grassley, a Republican Senator from Iowa, said in an interview. He sent a letter to Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer the day after Microsoft announced the job cuts last month, demanding Ballmer fire visa holders first. Across the technology industry, some of the biggest users of H1-B visas are cutting jobs, including Intel Corp., International Business Machines Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co. The firings at Microsoft, the world's largest software maker, came less than a year after Chairman Bill Gates lobbied Congress for an expansion of the visa program. Even before Microsoft announced the cuts, its first-ever companywide layoffs, comments on a blog run by an anonymous Microsoft worker angrily debated getting rid of guest workers first. The author of the Mini-Microsoft blog eventually had to censor and then completely block all arguments about visas, after the conversation "got downright nasty."

An Italian judge on Wednesday gave the go-ahead to a case in which Google (GOOG) could be held responsible for content it hosts but does not produce. The case centers on a 2006 video of four Italian youths taunting a child with Down syndrome. In the video, one of the youths incorrectly claims to be part of a small Down syndrome advocacy group called Vivi Down. The video was uploaded to the Google Video site, where it stayed for two months. Prosecutors have filed charges against five Google executives, saying they were in violation of Italian privacy laws and of contributing to the defamation of Vivi Down. At the heart of the case are two main questions: Should sites such as Google Video be held responsible for the content they host? And should such non-brick-and-mortar New Economy companies be subject to the laws in countries where they are not based? "The outcome of this will be to determine how big companies like Google should be expected to act," said Raffaele Zallone, a former chief counsel for IBM's Italian offices and the attorney representing a woman seeking damages in a secondary case tacked onto the main charges. FIND MORE STORIES IN: Italy | Google Inc | International Bus. Machines | Milan | New Economy Zallone, along with Milan prosecutors, the city's ombudsman and an attorney for Vivi Down, the advocacy group, say Google should have become aware of the offending video sooner and removed it sooner. Guglielmo Pisapia, Google's lead attorney in the case, denies any wrongdoing and says Google could not have acted differently. "Google did not produce the video, and when they received an official complaint, they removed it within five hours," said Pisapia, a former member of the Italian parliament. "If the argument is that they should have evaluated the video before it was posted, then that is a dangerous precedent." Oliviero Rossi, an author and commentator on technology issues, says unusual cases that push the limits of the law as this one does are

A company that monitors P2P networks says it found details about the president's helicopter, Marine One, on a computer in Tehran. Pittsburgh station WPXI reports. Bob Boback, CEO of Tiversa, said, "We found a file containing entire blueprints and avionics package for Marine One. … What appears to be a defense contractor in Bethesda, MD had a file sharing program on one of their systems that also contained highly sensitive blueprints for Marine One," Boback said. Retired Gen. Wesley Clark, an adviser to Tiversa, added: We found where this information came from. We know exactly what computer it came from. I'm sure that person is embarrassed and may even lose their job, but we know where it came from and we know where it went. It's no accident the information wound up in Iran, the company said. Countries like Iran, Pakistan, Yemen, Qatar and China are "actively searching for information that is disclosed in this fashion because it is a great source of intelligence," Boback said. Rep. Jason Altmire said he will ask Congress to investigate the risk to national security of this sort of exposure. Cnet's Charles Cooper interviewed the Tiversa's Sam Hopkins (Cooper says he's the CEO but the original report said Boback is CEO; the company website doesn't list executives), who said someone at the company was running a Gnutella client - possible a buggy one. Hopkins said it's hardly an unusual occurence - although presumably the usual breaches aren't so closely connected to the President. Everybody uses (P2P). Everybody. We see classified information leaking all the time. When the Iraq war got started, we knew what U.S. troops were doing because G.I.'s who wanted to listen to music would install software on secure computers and it got compromised. … We see information flying out there to Iran, China, Syria, Qatar-you name it. There's so much out there that sometimes we can't keep up with it. Bottom line: P2P is the big

Update on Feb. 18, 8:33 a.m.: Facebook is backing off changes to its terms of service, informing users on their official blog that they will remain intact. "Over the past couple of days, we received a lot of questions and comments about the changes and what they mean for people and their information," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg writes in the blog. "Based on this feedback, we have decided to return to our previous terms of use while we resolve the issues that people have raised." To learn more, read our original post below. Facebook is having trouble dousing the flames in a firestorm over its trustworthiness. A recent change in its terms of use -- the legalese tacked onto the bottom of most websites -- has sparked concerns that the social networking giant plans to own all users' information forever. Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg claimed in a blog post Monday that "on Facebook people own and control their information." But privacy advocates still aren't satisfied. "I think in simple terms it's a tug of war over user data," says Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) in Washington. "People put information on a Facebook page to share with friends. But it's pretty much with the understanding that they're deciding what to post and who has access to it. Facebook, like any other company, is trying to obtain maximum commercial value from its users."

Nearly one week after news emerged of the big data breach at Princeton, N.J.-based merchant acquirer Heartland Payment Systems Inc., it remains unclear how much damage actually happened and who did it. One report suggests Heartland's breach-related legal liabilities could approach $98 million, an estimate a Heartland spokesperson dismisses as speculative. The spokesperson tells Digital Transactions News on Monday that the so-called "sniffer" program secretly planted on one of Heartland's payment-processing platforms was not being used when investigators found it about two weeks ago. "It was inactive," the spokesperson says. "I want to be specific to say it was inactive," he adds, clarifying that the hackers hadn't deliberately disabled or deactivated it. Robert Carr, Heartland's chief executive, meanwhile, issued a statement calling for better industry cooperation and new operational procedures to prevent future data compromises, including industrywide, end-to-end encryption to fully protect cardholder data. Heartland uses encryption, but industry procedures leave data unencrypted during one brief point of the authorization process-a weakness that hackers have learned to exploit. Carr also said Heartland is working on its own system of end-to-end encryption.

Outgoing CPO of the Department of Homeland Security Hugo Teufel discusses his team's accomplishments and the challenges ahead for his successor. If you had a chance to pose any question to the person in charge of protecting Americans' privacy as the U.S. Department of Homeland Security executes its mission, what would you say? I had that chance this month when Hugo Teufel, departing chief privacy officer at the DHS, delivered an address, entitled "Reflections on My Time as DHS CPO of the War on Terror," to the Twin Cities Privacy Retreat. After the address, I cornered Teufel for some follow-up questions. Those and his answers follow.