Badly behaved children as young as five should be recorded on the national DNA database, a police chief said yesterday.
Gary Pugh, forensic science director for the Metropolitan Police, said children should be 'targeted' because future offenders can often be picked out at a young age.
The proposals come as the Government looks to crack down on potential young tearaways, introducing 'baby Asbos' for children as young as ten to stop them going off the rails.
Children's Secretary Ed Balls is to spend £218 million on a scheme targeting children who are considered likely to enter a life of crime.
Up to a thousand of the 'most challenging' children in the UK will be forced to stick to a good behaviour contract or face the threat of a criminal record.
A sophisticated bugging and tracking device has been unearthed in the vehicle of a member of the Dublin 32 County Sovereignty Movement. The device was secreted internally into the dashboard of the vehicle and was equipped with its own self contained power supply. The manner by which the device was installed strongly suggests that those who planted it took considerable time to effect this and was obviously professionally done. The device bears English Manufacturing Labels but as of yet it is uncertain whether it originates from a British, Irish or joint British/Irish intelligence source. Suffice to say that the unearthing of yet another intelligence gathering device clearly illustrates that the war against those who articulate the right of the Irish people to National Sovereignty continues in government(s) circles. The individual 32CSM member involved has sought legal advice on the matter. The 32CSM reiterates our call for all republicans to be diligent in the face of these insidious attempts to undermine the republican struggle. British Parliamentary activity in Ireland takes many forms.
Some workers are doing it at Dunkin' Donuts, Hilton hotels, even at Marine Corps bases. Employees at a growing number of businesses around the nation are starting and ending their days by pressing a hand or finger to a scanner that logs the precise time of their arrival and departure - information that is automatically reflected in payroll records.
Manufacturers say these biometric scanners improve efficiency and streamline payroll operations. Employers big and small buy them with the dual goals of curtailing fraud and automating outdated record keeping systems that rely on paper time sheets.
The new systems, however, have raised complaints from some workers who see the efforts to track their movements as excessive or even creepy.
The Federal Education Department proposed on Monday new regulations to clarify when universities may release confidential student information and, after the Virginia Tech shootings last year, reassure college officials that they will not face penalties for reporting fears about mentally ill students.
The proposed regulations were prompted by concerns that colleges were overemphasizing the students' privacy rights under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act to not intercede with young people who appear troubled.
Although the law has always had a health and safety exception that allows releasing confidential information in emergency situations, many college officials have been wary of invoking it, fearful of being found to violate the federal privacy law.
Even though the regulations would provide no major substantive changes, lawyers who specialize in education said they were important to the extent that they stop administrators from invoking the privacy act as an excuse for inaction.
Story of political intrigue the spine of which concerns a young man unexpectedly receiving a technology to eradicate the concept of privacy in our "post 9-11" world and examines just how much privacy we will trade for national security, against a background of competing corporate and political interests.
The main character in Gil's book, Charlie Sanders, finds himself caught in a surveillance experiment whose motives and purposes are unknown. He gets involved with a so called "open source intelligence" system which has the ability to obtain unlimited information from any database anywhere in the world and "speak" to Charlie through an earpiece.
Described as a cross between "Catch-22" and "Three Days of the Condor," this political thriller focuses on realistic technological details and takes the reader on a journey into an uncomfortable future that could easily become a reality.
Such a technology as described in the novel might enable us to surgically remove "bad guys" more quickly however would we know where to stop? Would we unconsciously begin to institute a form of fascism in our own country? Which areas are off-limits? An ensemble cast, representing the whole spectrum of opinions deal with these issues as Charlie is pursued by competing interests, and the technology itself starts making demands.
Global political tensions and actual pertinent technologies are also highlighted. Additional thematic questions are even more controversial: are we entering another dark age in history - of fading empires, religious fanaticism, economic stagnation and a retreat by civilized cultures into a few fortified enclaves?
Would you want other people to know, all day long, exactly where you are, right down to the street corner or restaurant?
Unsettling as that may sound to some, wireless carriers are betting that many of their customers do, and they're rolling out services to make it possible.
Sprint Nextel Corp. has signed up hundreds of thousands of customers for a feature that shows them where their friends are with colored marks on a map viewable on their cellphone screens. Now, Verizon Wireless is gearing up to offer such a service in the next several weeks to its 65 million customers, people familiar with it say.
[ ... ]
The wireless industry is cracking open this new market gingerly, mindful that it could face a huge backlash from consumers and regulators if location-tracking were abused by stalkers, sexual predators, advertisers or prosecutors. "When it gets to privacy, that's quite frankly an area where we can't afford to make any mistakes," says Ryan Hughes, a vice president at Verizon Wireless.
Like Sprint Nextel, Verizon Wireless will use a service called Loopt, led by a 22-year-old, Sam Altman, who created the software as an undergraduate at Stanford. Mr. Altman says he is well aware of the dangers of misuse. "It's one of those things, the more you think about it, the more ways you can figure out a creep could abuse it," says Mr. Altman, who, as chief executive of closely held Loopt Inc., in Mountain View, Calif., still carries a messenger bag to meetings. "I think people realize that unlike a telemarketer call, which can be annoying, a location-based service could be an actual physical safety risk."
While none of this discussion has swept into the U.S. media as yet, the implications are clear. In an article in the Globe and Mail this revealing trend was expressed:
"Some other organizations are banning Google's innovative tools outright to avoid the prospect of U.S. spooks combing through their data," Simon Avery wrote. "Security experts say many firms are only just starting to realize the risks they assume by embracing Web-based collaborative tools hosted by a U.S. company, a problem even more acute in Canada where federal privacy rules are at odds with U.S. security measures."
TorrentSpy's closure a win for MPAA; war far from over
Visitors to TorrentSpy are now being greeted with a brief message announcing the BitTorrent tracker's closure effective March 24. The shutdown comes in the wake of a December 2007 court decision that went against TorrentSpy, in which a federal judge awarded the MPAA a default judgment after finding that the site's admins systematically destroyed evidence.
Visitors to TorrentSpy are now being greeted with a brief message announcing the BitTorrent tracker's closure effective March 24. The shutdown comes in the wake of a December 2007 court decision that went against TorrentSpy, in which a federal judge awarded the MPAA a default judgment after finding that the site's admins systematically destroyed evidence.
[ ... ]
Shutting TorrentSpy down and potentially getting a nine-figure judgment against the site's operators (good luck collecting) is a small victory for the MPAA, but the group knows that there's still a long fight ahead. "Look, this is an uphill battle," Malcolm told Ars in an interview earlier this week. "Content providers can't afford to sit by and do nothing. We've seen some successes, but there is lots of work ahead of us."
Indeed there is. Although its admins are under indictment, The Pirate Bay continues to thumb its nose at Big Content, with Peter Sunde telling Ars that Swedish law is on The Pirate Bay's side. Earlier this week, a lawsuit against an Icelandic torrent site was dismissed, and many other torrent sites continue to operate with impunity outside of the US, beyond of the reach of the MPAA's attempts to knock them off the 'Net... so far.
The European Union is contributing 10 million euro (around £8 million) in sponsorship to a project called PrimeLife, which aims to develop open source tools for personal privacy management and protection, and get the community at large to adopt them.
PrimeLife's co-ordinator is IBM's Zurich research laboratory, and it follows on from an earlier EU-backed project into identity management systems, called Prime (Privacy and Identity Management in Europe).
Where Prime was mostly concerned with identity management (see its white paper here), PrimeLife will go beyond that to address privacy management and trust issues across a user's entire lifespan from childhood to old age, said IBM cryptography researcher Jan Camenisch, who is the project's technical leader.
The IAPP Recognizes UK Information Commissioner Richard Thomas With 2008 Privacy Leadership AwardUK Information Commissioner Richard Thomas today received the International Association of Privacy Professionals' 2008 Privacy Leadership Award for his ongoing commitment to raising the public profile of privacy and data protection issues.
Thomas accepted the award at the IAPP's Privacy Summit in Washington, D.C., where more than 1,000 global privacy professionals have convened for three days of education, networking and certification. The IAPP is the world's largest association for the privacy profession.
"Commissioner Thomas has demonstrated an enduring commitment to strengthening privacy protections during his tenure," said Sandra R. Hughes, Global Ethics, Compliance and Privacy Executive, The Procter and Gamble Company. "Under his leadership, the ICO has focused on raising public awareness of important privacy issues and strengthening the UK's approach to preventing and addressing misuse of sensitive data and other harmful practices. The Commissioner has diligently worked to further the protection of citizens' rights through public debate, education, regulatory action and enforcement."
Since Thomas was appointed Commissioner in 2002, the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has adopted a new approach to its functions, structure and working methods with the overall aim of "strengthening public confidence in data protection by taking a practical, down to earth approach -- simplifying and making it easier for the majority of organisations who seek to handle personal information well, and tougher for the minority who do not." Thomas also has:
-- Established the ICO's position as a strategic regulator, with clear
priorities for promotional, educational, complaint-handling and enforcement
responsibilities
-- Substantially raised the public profile of privacy issues through
fulfilment of a targeted communications strategy
-- Led two current Parliamentary enquiries and many other ongoing debates
about the Surveillance Society
-- Launched specific initiatives, including the UK Privacy Impact
Assessment Handbook; Employment and CCTV Codes of Practice; Data Sharing
Framework Code; and various enforcement actions in the banking, retail, law
enforcement and public service sectors
-- Raised fundamental questions about new proposals, including national
ID cards, the Children's Database and electronic health records
-- Championed new international projects, including Binding Corporate
Rules and the London Initiative on improving Commissioner effectiveness
-- Implemented the UK Freedom of Information Act, with the ICO closing
over 6,000 cases in the first three years
PrivacyFinder aims to help people take an active role in protecting their privacy while searching online, reports the Electronic Freedom Foundation.
PrivacyFinder is a project of the CMU Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory. The website, free to use, boasts a number of features that privacy advocates have publicly advocated as crucial:
It only retains data on user behavior for a week. Data is used to research search engine preferences and use.It clearly displays the privacy policy of the sites users visit, which helps when considering whether to make an e-commerce transaction at that destination, or share personal information with the site for other reasons.
PrivacyFinder has so far found that people intending to make an online purchase are more likely to do so on sites with greater privacy protection. This discovery mirrors findings from a recent study on mobile P2P payments by Javelin Strategy and Research.
PrivacyFinder provides access to both Yahoo and Google.
A Paris court ruled on Thursday that a user-generated website had violated a film star's privacy by hosting a link to a report about him, in a potentially landmark ruling for the French Internet.
The court ruled that fuzz.fr made an "editorial" decision to link to a story on a gossip news site about French actor Olivier Martinez and his relationship with singer Kylie Minogue -- and was therefore responsible for its content.
The fuzz.fr website -- taken offline following the lawsuit -- allowed users to post links to their favourite stories elsewhere on the web, with the most popular ones automatically displayed at the top spot.
Its creator Eric Dupin was ordered to pay 1,000 euros (1,600 dollars) in damages to Martinez and 1,500 euros in legal costs.
With the recent controversy over privacy in recent day and in particular Phorm; Jane Horvath, Senior Privacy Counsel, and Peter Fleischer, Global Privacy Counsel decided to release a statement on privacy.
Google commented "Because we're strongly committed to protecting your privacy, we want to present our privacy practices in the clearest way possible.
Over the past year, we've been experimenting with video to clarify and illustrate the privacy practices set forth in our Google Privacy Policy.
We've used videos to communicate with you about things like cookies, IP addresses, and logs. (Check out the Google Privacy Channel on YouTube.) And you've told us that the screen shots, whiteboard drawings, and pointers from the engineers and product managers we've captured on video are helping you better understand the fine points of our Privacy Policy.
With that in mind, today we're announcing a revamp of our Privacy Center.
The new Center is a one-stop shop for privacy resources, with various multi-media formats aimed to help you further understand how we store and use data, how to control who you share your data with, and how we protect your privacy.
If it manages to pass into law, the net effect of New York state Assemblyman Richard Brodsky's bill — which mandates that the likes of Yahoo, Google and Microsoft provide the ability to opt out from tracking — is likely to be minimal.
First, as any email marketer can tell you, the difference between opting out and opting in is a couple million subscribers or so.
Second, and notwithstanding blogger-supported privacy activism, Web users are remarkably indifferent to privacy concerns. Oh, they say they care, but their actions frequently prove otherwise. Consider the experience of Dave Morgan, formerly executive vice president of global advertising strategy at AOL (which bought Morgan's company TACODA mid-last year):
Early on, when we were first developing behavioral targeting at TACODA, we knew that tracking cookies had the potential to make some folks uncomfortable… We launched an aggressive opt-out program for those who didn't want our cookies on their browsers. Interestingly, over the year, even thought we launched program after higher profile program to promote the opt-out, only a relatively few folks ever chose to do so. While lots of studies claimed folks were deleting cookies that enabled highly targeted advertising, they never did it in sufficient numbers to hurt our business. Why? They liked the ability to customize their portal pages and not have to reenter passwords every time they went to a site that had earlier required registration or a dozen other shortcuts made possible by cookies.
Consumers understand that they have gotten something of a free content lunch for over a decade and have said in lots of studies that they'd rather see ads than pay for online content.
Third, there's a big chunk of our population that has no idea what we're talking about, and which will remain clueless no matter how big you make the opt-out notice. I don't know the exact size of this group, but at a minimum it contains the 24% of users that can't even find Google.
Fourth, in defiance of the slightly hysterical claims by IAB lobbyist Mike Zaneis ("If you take the fuel out of this engine, you begin to see the free services and content dry up"), advertising can't leave the Internet: that's where consumers are.
Fifth, there are benefits to personalization — think Amazon recommendations — that people don't want to lose.
Sixth, the bill wouldn't achieve the objective, which seems to be education. Brodsky says he's got no "philosophical objection to targeting, if it's done with permission." The problem, rather, is that "people right now do not understand what they're actually giving up." But even with opt-out notices, people would have to invest significant time and effort (something they're unlikely to do) to really grasp the implications of online personal data and make an informed decision.
You might guess from the above that I'm opposed to this sort of privacy regulation; you'd be wrong. On the contrary, I'm a staunch right-to-privacy advocate. And Brodsky's hope for "a compromise position that enables many ad practices but enhances consumer protection" is admirable.
What I'd like to see, though, are proposals that incent the right behavior and discourage the wrong behavior. The discussion needs to consider the ability to opt out and the ability to manage personal history and data security standards and the benefits of personalization and behavior tracking. It has to address more than the tech-savvy elite.
She's frustrated police can't tell her privately what her son's blood-alcohol readings were the January morning he and two friends died in a high-impact crash with an Ottawa bus.
Instead, her family is left with the ambiguous police statement, "alcohol was a factor,'' released to the public Friday with no indication how much Mark MacDonald really had to drink before getting behind the wheel of his Toyota 4Runner.
Hazel MacDonald is disheartened that Mark's name is being "blackened'' by people who don't know all the facts surrounding the tragic collision.
Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the world wide web, put privacy into the spotlight last week when he warned social networkers that everything they post online might be read by friends and relatives, present and future.
Sir Tim's was the latest high- profile warning over invasions of privacy, particularly on the web. As going online has become part of everyday life there has been an associated rise in campaigns and lobbying by "privacy activists", who harry any business they believe is cavalier with personal details.
So far, the two sides have been archenemies. However, as consumer privacy and how to handle it becomes an increasingly hot issue for companies, some are contemplating a truce and inviting activists into the boardroom to advise on strategy.
There is a tradition of non-governmental organisations and the corporate world pooling some of their expertise: Greenpeace has entered alliances with a number of multinationals, for instance.
Simon Davies, of pressure group Privacy International, says: "We have become a bit burned out from constantly fighting. We could do a lot more with that energy."
Microsoft, Facebook and AOL are some of the companies now working with the consultancy arm of Privacy International, 80/20 Thinking, to iron out problems with their data protection policies. For Microsoft, engagement such as this represents a change in attitude. Although the company says it has always been committed to protecting privacy, it has not always been receptive to suggestions by activists.
The federal privacy commissioner is investigating whether Brenda Martin's privacy was violated when a government report wound up in the media.
The commissioner's office said Friday it has opened a file, but wouldn't confirm whether anyone has filed a complaint. Liberal MP Dan McTeague, the party's consular affairs critic, has called for the privacy commissioner to look into how The Canadian Press obtained a report detailing consular contacts with Martin.
A three-year project to infuse privacy controls into identity technologies and emerging social networking communities is being undertaken by IBM Research with funding help from the European Union.
The intent is to create technology to ensure users can protect their privacy online for their entire lifetime, especially given the rising popularity of social networks and virtual communities.
PrimeLife (Privacy and Identity Management in Europe for Life) is a three-year research project funded by the European Union's Seventh Research Framework Program, one in a series of programs the E.U. has established to provide financial support for research and development across various scientific disciplines.
The group has seeded IBM's Zurich Research Lab with 10 million euros ($15.8 million). The lab is coordinating the research, which involves 14 other partners from various countries, including Brown University in the United States.
IBM Research says it hopes to create a "toolbox" that amounts to an electronic data manager that gives users an overview of which personal data they use when, where, and how. Users would be able to define default privacy settings and preferences for many applications and would receive prompts if applications seek data for any other purpose.
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