Monthly Archives: October 2015

The How/What/When/Where of Location Data

Location data is one of the most coveted and sensitive data points in the digital ecosystem, and combined with an array of new context-based services, it promises a future of ultra-personalization. In this post for Privacy Perspectives, I discuss the state of location information and the unclear rules and control around the collection and use of this information. As companies build more and more advertising and user-profiling on top of different types of location data, we need to provide more effective controls. // More on IAPP Privacy Perspectives.

Voter Privacy and the Future of Democracy

Voter Privacy and the Future of Democracy

As the election season gets into full swing, I teamed up with Evan Selinger to discuss some of the privacy challenges facing the campaigns. A recent study by the Online Trust Alliance found major failings’ with the campaigns’ privacy policies, and beyond the nuts and bolts of having an online privacy notice, political hunger for data presents very real challenges for voters and perhaps more provocatively, for democracy. // More at the Christian Science Monitor’s Passcode.

Practical Privacy in 60 Minutes: Computers Freedom & Privacy 2015

After doing a roundtable on cookie tracking, Justin Brookman, formerly of the Center for Democracy & Technology, suggested with the proliferation of privacy tools, good and bad, he’d love to see what he could really do to protect his privacy in an hour. Inspired by this, I put together a panel conversation with Meghan Land, Staff Attorney, Privacy Rights Clearinghouse; Rainey Reitman, Activism Director, EFF; and Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU.

My aim was to try and have a high-level conversation/debate about what average folks would reasonably do to protect their privacy. Coming up with a set of basic privacy (and security) is tough: encrypted email is probably too hard, having a complex password system is probably too annoying. For sixty minute, I provoked the panelists and the audience at Computers Freedom and Privacy 2015 as to what we what might actually suggest to consumers and citizens.

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