Verizon racks up $1.35M fine for violating consumer privacy

How much does your privacy cost? A cool $1.35 million, according to the Federal Communications Commission.

On Monday, the Federal Communications Commission said it had reached a deal with Verizon over the company's use of a technology that allowed marketers to track customers' web browsing so they could provide more targeted advertising. The so-called supercookies were hidden bits of code that couldn't be easily erased when consumers cleared their browsing history.

As part of the agreement, Verizon will pay the $1.35 million fine and shift from an opt-out policy to a more explicit opt-in policy for consumers. Now it will only share "supercookie" data with third parties if customers have decided to participate. The company will still be able to use the "supercookie" tracking information when customers connect to Verizon's corporate services to market its own services to its customers. 

by Marguerite Reardon
read full article at CNET

UK setting bad example on surveillance, says UN privacy chief

The UK is setting a bad example to the rest of the world with proposed changes to the law on surveillance, the United Nations special rapporteur on privacy has said.

The criticism by rapporteur Joseph Cannataci is made in a report presented to the UN Human Rights Council. The report deals with privacy concerns worldwide but Cannataci, concerned about developments in the UK, has devoted a section to the British bill.

He says the British government has failed to recognise the consequences of legitimising bulk data collection or mass surveillance. Instead of legitimising it, the government should be outlawing it, he says. 

By Ewen MacAskill
read full article at Guardian

Penny Pritzker on the Privacy Shield Pact With Europe

The E.U.-U.S. Privacy Shield may, at first blush, sound like a pretty boring group of superhero characters. But the agreement, whose details were released late last month, will have a major impact on how companies collect, manage and use digital data transferred from Europe to the United States.

It places a greater onus on companies like Google and General Electric to ensure people’s digital information — from social media posts to employee payroll data — is not misused. The deal also forces the United States government to further limit what access the country’s intelligence agencies have to Europeans’ data when it is moved across the Atlantic.

The European Court of Justice, the region’s highest court, ruled last year that the previous data-transfer agreement was invalid because it did not provide sufficient protection for European citizens when their data was transferred to the United States. 

By Mark Scott
read full article at NY Times

United States: Privacy Shield Takes Another Step Forward

Roughly three weeks ago EU and U.S. negotiators announced that they had reached agreement on a replacement for the Safe Harbor mechanism for compliance with European regulations on transfers of personal information to the United States. More than 4,000 U.S. businesses were reliant on Safe Harbor to allow them to receive data from Europe on EU-based customers and employees when, in October 2015, it was invalidated by the EU Court of Justice, creating great risk for the businesses that had relied on it. As we reported here, representatives of the U.S. and the EU had already missed the deadline set by European privacy regulators to satisfactorily replace Safe Harbor or see the flow of data to the U.S. cease when a deal was struck even as the deadline in fact passed. The trouble with the February agreement was that the negotiators had nothing to show the regulators beyond an outline of the principles underpinning the deal.

The European regulators' body, known as the Article 29 Working Party ("Working Party"), with which the European Commission ("Commission") must consult on data protection matters, adopted a "wait and see" attitude after the Privacy Shield announcement. However, to avoid a data flow interruption, the Working Party gave U.S. and EU officials an end of February deadline to disclose the details of the Privacy Shield for its review.

On the last day of February, just within the deadline set by the Working Party, the European Commission released the details of the Privacy   Shield agreement announced four weeks earlier. Accompanying that text was a draft decision of the Commission declaring that the Privacy Shield will provide adequate protection to the privacy rights of EU citizens whose private information will be transferred to the U.S. under its terms. A decision with respect to the adequacy of a data protection mechanism by the Commission is a predicate under the Data Protection Directive to the lawful transfer of personal data outside the EU. 

By Scott J. Wenner
Schnader Harrison Segal & Lewis LLP

read full article at Mondaq

FCC Plans to Expand Low-Income Assistance to Broadband Ahead of Privacy Rules

This morning, FCC chairman Tom Wheeler posted a lengthy letter to his office's website that laid out the Commission's plans for Lifeline, a federal program which provides a $10 per month subsidy to the lowest-income Americans for wired phone services. In 2013, the program provided $1.8 billion in subsidies to 14.2 million people.

"We can recite statistics all we want," Wheeler writes, "but we must never lose sight of the fact that what we’re really talking about is people -- unemployed workers who miss out on jobs that are only listed online, students who go to fast-food restaurants to use the Wi-Fi hotspots to do homework, veterans who are unable to apply for their hard-earned benefits, seniors who can’t look up health information when they get sick."

To that end, Wheeler is set to propose an overhaul to the Lifeline program that would extend its purview to broadband access. 

By Andrew Flanagan
read full article at Billboard

ACLU Urges Feds To Adopt Privacy Rules For Broadband And Cable

A coalition of privacy groups including the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and New America's Open Technology Institute wrote to the Federal Communications Commission Monday calling on the telecom regulator to limit how broadband and cable providers use personal data about viewing and browsing habits.

"ISPs currently play a leading role in the complex ecosystem of online behavioral advertising and related forms of data-driven, targeted marketing," the groups warned. "These companies are showing an increased interest in monetizing the data they collect about their customers, and they are leveraging their position as gatekeepers to the Internet to harness this data in powerful and invasive ways."

Verizon has in place sophisticated ad-targeting and consumer-tracking technology for mobile users, and Comcast has said it would share cable set-top box analytics data with its NBCUniversal content division, the groups said. 

By Steven Melendez
read full article at FastCompany

Overnight Tech: FCC Internet privacy rules loom

Thursday is the deadline for the agency to put items on the tentative agenda for the March open meeting. Which means we could get our first information tomorrow on Chairman Tom Wheeler's anticipated plan to police privacy at broadband providers.

Wheeler talked about the privacy issue in a laudatory Verge interview (headline: "The Dragonslayer") released Wednesday. 

"When these companies were operating as phone companies, the information generated by a phone call couldn't be released unless the consumer said so," he said, after identifying privacy as the next big net neutrality battleground. "You've got to ask yourself the question: why is the information generated by an internet search different?" 

By David McCabe and Mario Trujillo
read full article at The Hill

Privacy groups want rules for how ISPs can track their customers

Some Internet service providers are building powerful tools to track customers, and the U.S. Federal Communications Commission needs to step in, privacy advocates say.

Some privacy advocates are calling on the FCC to create new regulations that limit how ISPs can track their customers across the Internet. The agency could release a proposal for ISP privacy rules as soon as this month, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said last week.

Some ISPs are deploying "invasive and ubiquitous" tracking practices as a way to deliver targeted advertising to customers, 12 privacy groups said in a letter to the FCC this week. In recent years, large ISPs like Comcast and Verizon have entered into advertising partnerships or launched their own advertising services that take advantage of ISP customer data, the letter said. 

By Grant Gross
read full article at PC World

Cable, Wireless Companies Face New Privacy Rules

U.S. Federal Communications Commission officials soon will seek to impose new customer-privacy rules on Internet access providers, a move expected to fuel an already fierce conflict with the industry.

The new rules, which could be brought up at an FCC meeting as soon as this month are intended to help shield tens of millions of consumers from potentially unwanted use of their Internet data by the providers, many of whom are looking to boost profits by using customer data to sell more targeted advertising online.

The Internet access companies—which include cable and wireless firms—are digging in for a regulatory fight, arguing that tough new FCC rules could put them at a disadvantage, particularly against Internet-services firms such as Alphabet Inc.’s Google unit or Facebook Inc. that wouldn’t be covered by the new FCC rules.

By John McKinnon
read full article at WSJ

Europe’s Protectionist Privacy Advocates

Max Schrems is no hero. The Austrian privacy activist was hailed in some quarters last fall for helping bring down the 15-year-old Safe Harbor pact that facilitated digital trade worth more than $250 billion annually between Europe and the U.S. But he is unwittingly reducing his fellow Europeans’ right to privacy, forcing businesses to pay needless costs and fanning the flames of protectionism.

A graduate student at the University of Vienna, the 28-year-old Mr. Schrems made headlines after the Edward Snowden story broke in 2013 by filing a series of lawsuits against Facebook for not taking adequate safeguards to protect its users from National Security Agency surveillance.

By Roslyn Layton 

read full article at WSJ 

Licensing online gambling in Greece and the OPAP conflict

Greece’s monopoly gambling operator OPAP is seeking in excess of €1b in damages as a result of the Government’s “abrupt and counterproductive interventions” in its business. The Greek Government also recently announced its intention to establish a new licensing regime for online gambling. 

By Spiros Tassis
read full article at Linkedin