Aministrivia: I have relocated the XML files that contain the RSS and ScriptingNews news feeds. Please switch over to the new locations as soon as possible. The old locations will be maintained for a while to ease the transition but will be phased out as part of implementing some other changes. Some of you have updated your news aggregators but may are still using the old locations. Unfortunatley some new subscribers are being pointed to the old addresses and doing the same to their readers. So please update to the new locations as soon as possible. If you are having problems please let me know at syndication-at-PrivacyDigest.com The new locations for each of the news feeds are listed below

Users of Radio 8 from UserLand can just click on this graphic and be automatically subscribed to the news feed at the new location. The URL is: http://127.0.0.1:5335/system/pages/subscriptions?url=http://www.PrivacyDigest.com/xml/scriptingNews2.xml

The RSS 0.9 formatted file can be found by clicking on this graphic. This version just contains the headlines without the 'pull quotes' The URL is: http://www.PrivacyDigest.com/xml/rss.xml

The ScriptingNews ver 2 formatted file can be found by clicking on this graphic. This version contains both the headlines and the 'pull quotes' The URL is: http://www.PrivacyDigest.com/xml/scriptingNews2.xml

San Jose Mercury News - New bills aim to protect consumers' use of digital media.

WASHINGTON - The battle being waged in Washington over copyright in the digital age ratchets up a notch this week as new legislation is introduced aimed at clarifying consumer rights.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-San Jose, plans today to introduce the ``Digital Choice and Freedom Act,'' Silicon Valley's response to a host of Hollywood-backed bills tilted in favor of copyright holders.

Lofgren's bill would ensure consumers can copy CDs, DVDs and other digital works for personal use, just as they now do with TV shows and audio tapes.

``This would not authorize someone taking their digital content and sharing it with a million of their best friends,'' Lofgren said in an interview Tuesday. Instead of creating new rights for consumers, she said, her bill would ensure that ``the rights they have in the analog world, they have in digital.''

[ ... ]

The bills also would amend a 1998 law, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, that makes it a crime to circumvent technological protections built in to copyrighted works. Instead, consumers would be allowed to bypass the technology if the intent is to make a copy for personal use.

The legislation will vie with Hollywood-backed proposals, filed by Sen. Ernest Hollings, D-S.C., and Rep. Howard L. Berman, D-Los Angeles, that would embed copy protection into PCs and an array of consumer devices, and allow the music and film industry to use aggressive anti-piracy technologies to thwart unauthorized downloading over the Internet.

Slashdot | Your Rights Online - Protecting Your DRM Rights.

A reader wrote to say: "There's an article on SiliconValley.com that talks about a new bill in Congress that will, if passed, mean that consumers can copy CDs, DVDs and other digital works for personal use, just as they now do with TV shows and audio tapes. ."

San Jose Mercury News By Dan Gillmor- Apple stands firm against entertainment cartel.

Intel's doing it. Advanced Micro Devices is doing it. Microsoft is doing it.

Apple Computer isn't.

What's Apple not doing? It's not -- at least so far -- moving toward an anti-customer embrace with Hollywood's movie studios and the other members of the powerful entertainment cartel.

Unlike Intel and AMD, the big chip makers for Windows-based computers, Apple hasn't announced plans to put technology into hardware that could end up restricting what customers do with the products they buy. Unlike Microsoft, Apple hasn't asserted the right to remote control over users' operating systems.

The era of Digital Rights Management, commonly called DRM, is swiftly moving closer, thanks to the Intels and AMDs and Microsofts. They're busy selling and creating the tools that give copyright holders the ability to tell users of copyrighted material -- customers, scholars, libraries, etc. -- precisely how they may use it. DRM, in the most typical use of the expression, is about owners' rights. It would be more accurate to call DRM, in that context, ``Digital Restrictions Management.''

[ ... ]

Can Apple's distinctly pro-customer approach continue in the face of Hollywood's ire and the entertainment industry's clout in Congress?

Slashdot | Apple - Apple Shuns DRM Efforts So Far.

Graff writes "This was found on SiliconValley.com. In an article for the Mercury News, Dan Gillmor talks about how Apple is still standing firm against the Digital Rights Management (DRM) efforts which the entertainment industry is trying to force on the public. There's also another article on the fight for our digital rights in Congress."

New York Times - Letters to the Editor: free registration required Is Big Brother Coming, or Is He Here? Re "As Security Cameras Sprout, Someone's Always Watching" (front page, Sept. 29):

New York Times via The Salt Lake Tribune - 'Tiny Brother' Security Cameras Draw Attention to Public Privacy.

PORTERVILLE, Calif. -- With the recent arrest of a woman in Indiana whom a security camera videotaped beating her daughter in a parking lot, the presence of electronic eyes across America has drawn new attention.

But what security and privacy specialists have long known might surprise people in towns like this: The surveillance equipment is everywhere, not just in big cities and at obvious places like Times Square or outside the White House, but also in Porterville and Mishawaka, Ind., and hundreds of other places.

More often than not, private rather than public hands are controlling the lenses, as was the case in the Indiana parking lot.

St. Paul Pioneer Press, MN - | 09/30/2002 | MINNESOTA: Privacy, research at issue in state Health Department plan for database.

This week, a judge will hear arguments on whether the Minnesota Health Department should be allowed to start collecting medical information, including names, birth dates and diagnoses, on nearly every Minnesotan.

The Health Department wants to create a massive database as part of a plan to track the quality of health in the state.

But a public health nurse is trying to stop it. Twila Brase, who runs the Citizens' Council on Health Care in St. Paul, says the database is nothing less than an assault on privacy.

The two sides face off Friday, when an Administrative Law Judge Allan W. Klein holds a hearing in St. Paul to determine whether the plan should take effect.

The medical database, which would include everything from who takes Prozac to who has an abortion, knee surgery or a heart attack, can be compiled without infringing on patient confidentiality, health officials say. Information that identifies people either would be deleted or encrypted under the proposed rule, which was authorized by a 1993 law.

But Brase, who has been battling the plan for years, said the encryption is no guarantee of privacy, because somebody has the key to the code.

"Our very utmost concern is that they have no right to get it," Brase said. "And we would argue secondarily that it can be abused."

Computerworld - IBM automates privacy compliance.

IBM next month will launch a privacy management product, created with the help of some large corporate users, that lets companies build privacy policies directly into their data management systems. The aim is to enable companies to automate their compliance with privacy laws and corporate regulations.

The IBM system is unique in that it takes "privacy law and turns it into a set of privacy rules. I haven't seen anything like that in the industry," said Rick Lacafta, head of IT security at Travelers Property Casualty Corp. in Hartford, Conn. "I think it's a very big strength of the product."

But Lacafta also sees the IBM Tivoli Privacy Manager as a work in progress that has to be developed for more environments and tested for its impact on performance. Travelers, a member of IBM's end-user group, the Privacy Manager Council, is piloting the tool and starting development work to adapt it to some of its customer data systems.

The privacy manager is intended to address the problem of applying customer privacy preferences, legal requirements and company policies to business practices throughout a corporation. Many systems that do that today are limited to specific applications.

This IBM system, however, uses a privacy classification protocol, the World Wide Web Consortium's Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P), to classify data on back-end systems. P3P allows privacy preferences to be turned into machine-readable code and is widely used in setting privacy policies for Web browsers. Once data is classified or tagged, servers or privacy monitors apply the P3P-enabled rules, enforce access rules and create audit trails.

[ ... ]

Implementing Tivoli Privacy Manager is no easy task. It was developed to work right out of the box with Lightweight Directory Access Protocol support, but Travelers, for instance, wants to use it with MQSeries, IBM's messaging platform.

Lacafta said the IBM system has to be instructed to handle a company's technology choices and noted that "it's not ubiquitous." But an idea he may raise with the privacy council is having the participants share their systems development work.

Toogood Reports Commentary: Phyllis Schlafly - Your Financial Privacy On The Chopping Block.

A collection of information about your financial affairs is a valuable commercial commodity. It includes what's in your bank accounts and on your credit cards, your deposits and withdrawals, your purchases and investments, your car loans and mortgage payments.

Who owns that collection of information: you or the institution that entered it on a database where a computer can retrieve it for numerous commercial purposes? When that question was discussed at a Financial Privacy hearing of the Senate Banking Committee on September 19, it was clear that banks think they own your financial information.

[ ... ]

Now add another tool to the arsenal of the telemarketer. After his persuasive powers are wearing down your resistance, he can directly charge your account without having to request your signature, credit card number, or other evidence that you consented to the purchase.

This practice is known in the trade as preacquired account telemarketing. Before he called you, the telemarketer preacquired your account number from your bank (which is getting its cut of the profit) so you wouldn't have to bother with the nuisance of personally providing your credit card number.

It isn't hard to figure out that senior citizens are especially vulnerable to the salesmanship of telemarketers armed with preacquired account numbers. All the more so if the elderly are unsuspicious, hard of hearing, absent-minded, or when English is their second language.

Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Leader: The limits of privacy . Are media executives now fair game?

Everyone is entitled to respect for his or her private and family life. That's what it says in the press complaints commission code of conduct, adding: "A publication will be expected to justify intrusions into any individual's private life without consent."

New York Times - free registration required Judge Upholds Privacy for Jeb Bush's Daughter.

A judge ruled today that staff members at a drug rehabilitation center in Orlando, where Gov. Jeb Bush's daughter, Noelle, is receiving treatment, cannot be forced to cooperate with an investigation into an accusation that she had possessed crack cocaine.

Chief Judge Belvin Perry Jr. of Circuit Court of Orange County in Orlando wrote in his ruling that patient privacy outweighed law enforcement interests in cases in which addicts relapse in treatment.

ABC ("Australian Broadcasting Corporation") - Doctors concerned about patient privacy..

A survey of GP's has revealed more than half are not cooperating with a Federal Government initiative designed to gather data on mental illness.

More than 500 doctors responded to the AMA's survey on the initiative, with over 85 per cent expressing concern about patient privacy.

The AMA's Dr David Rivett says they fear patients could be stigmatised.

atnewyork - 'ClickWrap' Ruling Could Allow Privacy Suits.

AOL Time Warner's Netscape Communications browser division has lost an appeal in a lawsuit accusing it of electronic eavesdropping with "cookies" (define), which it had used with its free software "SmartDownload" feature.

Political News from Wired News - New Text Msg: Joe Schmoe 4 Prez.

The 2002 election could be the last in which old media dominates political advertising, if recent actions by the Federal Election Commission bear fruit.

In late August, the FEC granted a petition by New Jersey-based Target Wireless to waive disclosure rules for political ads beamed to wireless devices using short message service technology, meaning that SMS political ads wouldn't have to disclose who paid for them.

Then the agency started investigating whether the campaign finance law sponsored by Sens. John McCain (R-Arizona) and Russ Feingold (D-Wisconsin) is too hands-off for emerging mediums such as interactive TV services. The McCain-Feingold law takes effect after the Nov. 6 elections.

The issue is far from cut and dried. McCain and Feingold agree that websites and e-mail communications should be exempted from strict rules, but they want the FEC to consider including messages that may be the "functional equivalent" of radio and television broadcasts such as messages transmitted over the Internet to a TV set.

Because broadcast spectrum is finite and newsprint is not, regulators have always treated the mediums differently. The question is how to categorize the Web TV and SMS, which don't fit neatly into either group.

"Network World Fusion" - P3P plan.

Deploying P3P requires you to convert the privacy practices of your organization into P3P format. To do this, you use a P3P editor such as the aptly named P3P Editor or an online policy generator such as P3P Edit. These tools prompt you to answer a series of multiple-choice questions regarding major aspects of your site's privacy policy. This information is used to generate a full XML-based P3P policy and a compact policy that is presented as a simple HTTP header.

[ ... ]

Today, however, most P3P implementations do not generally operate using the full P3P policy. Instead browsers such as Internet Explorer 6 and Netscape 7 support only the compact policy form of P3P.

The compact policy focuses primarily on cookie usage with a short set of keywords transmitted by HTTP headers. Setting the HTTP headers can be accomplished either programmatically if pages are generated using a technology such as ASP, PHP or "Java", by setting a server configuration, or using a Web server add-on.

ZDNet |UK| - US firms fight Euro data protection laws.

Companies such as IBM, Oracle and VeriSign are asking for EU laws on data protection laws to be relaxed, to aid global business

A group of American companies is attempting this week to persuade the European Union to relax its rules governing data protection, claiming they are bad for business.

The 10 companies, who dub themselves the Global Privacy Alliance (GPA) and whose members include IBM, Oracle and VeriSign, believe that the EU has put too much emphasis on the protection of individuals' privacy, and not enough on ensuring the free flow of information between companies.

The GPA wants several significant changes to be made to EU privacy laws -- the simplification of the cross-border flow of data, possibly through industry self-regulation rather than legislation; the harmonisation of EU privacy regulation between member states; the relaxation of restrictions on data sharing between affiliate companies, and the exclusion of 'business contact data' from such laws.

CNET NEWS.COM - EU members seek changes to privacy law.

Reuters UK - Four EU Member States Seek Changes to Privacy Law .

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Four European Union member states are seeking changes to the bloc's tough data privacy law, hoping to cut red tape and facilitate cross-border data transfers, a document obtained by Reuters showed on Tuesday.

In a position paper sent to the European Commission, Britain, Finland, Austria and Sweden said they wanted the directive to be amended to redress current imbalances and remove unnecessary bureaucratic requirements.

[ ... ]

Under the EU data protection directive, personal data ranging from sensitive medical records to phone numbers or e-mail addresses can be disclosed or transferred to third parties only with the individual's explicit consent.

The law, drafted before Internet use became as widespread as it is today, was expected to enhance privacy protection but has caused a headache for companies operating globally when they transfer data from one country to another.

U.S. companies have been particularly vocal against the EU law, which forces non-EU firms to match EU privacy standards.

[ ... ]

The European Commission is looking into possible amendments to its privacy laws after an online survey showed broad dissatisfaction with the current regime.

But while business wants the EU to soften the law, European citizens said they felt the level of protection was inadequate, a survey involving over 9,000 EU citizens showed.

Most respondents said they feared their data could be misused while they used the Internet, in particular when conducting online financial transactions.

CNET NEWS.COM - Netscape loses privacy dispute.

Netscape Communications customers suing the company for privacy invasion are not bound by an end-user license agreement forcing them into arbitration, a federal appeals court panel ruled Tuesday.

At least three groups of Netscape users have sued the company in recent years, alleging that the AOL Time Warner unit's SmartDownload software invaded people's privacy and violated laws prohibiting electronic surveillance by sending their personal information back to the company. AOL shuttered the tracking feature soon after it was sued.

But AOL also argued that plaintiffs could not pursue their complaints in the courts because they were obligated to comply with an electronic agreement to resolve disputes via arbitration instead.

However, a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled against AOL on the end-user license issue, saying people who obtained SmartDownload had not received reasonable notice of the terms of the agreement, which in most cases were presented to them on the Web page below the download button. The ruling should clear the way for the privacy suits to go forward. In affirming a lower court decision, the judges also said that the agreement, which was designed to cover Communicator, did not also apply to the SmartDownload plug-in.

CNET NEWS.COM - Standards urged for e-tail commissions.

Online merchants want new standards to help fight "parasiteware," an increasingly visible breed of software that seeks to pocket commissions doled out through the Web's ubiquitous affiliate marketing programs.

Shawn Schwegman, the director of affiliate marketing at Web store Overstock.com has proposed a meeting among representatives of online merchants, affiliates and affiliate networks to develop the standard. The goal is to be able to quickly identify and act against software that credits the wrong party when online stores tally commissions for Web referrals.

Additionally, a network of affiliates called Be Free has issued a proposal for how such networks should handle commission diversion software.

Slashdot | Your Rights Online - SA Government's Crypto Registration Up And Running.

orange writes "Anyone who supplies crypto products to South Africans (and the government defines crypto as almost anything) has to register with the appropriate agency and pay a ZAR2000 fee (US$200). Failure to supply South Africans without being registered means potential jail time (How they're gonna get you unless you come to South Africa is another story). A copy of the legislation can be found can be found online."

ZDNet - Professor posts digital device hit list.

Could singing fish novelties be hooked by a proposed law requiring anti-copying technology in digital devices?

Princeton professor Ed Felten thinks so.

The computer scientist has launched a site, called Fritz's Hit List, that points out devices that could be forced to carry anti-copying technology if Sen. Fritz Hollings', D-S.C., Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA) passes. The bill, which is designed to thwart piracy, would restrict digital products that don't carry government-approved security technology.

So far, Fritz's Hit List features a catalog of unlikely devices Felten said would be regulated under the law. They include common objects such as baby monitors and automobile navigation systems as well as seemingly innocuous toys such as the Shop With Me Barbie toy cash register, the Sony Aibo robot dog and Big Mouth Billy Bass.

"That's right, your favorite wall-hanging, singing, dancing, animatronic fish qualifies for regulation as a 'digital media device' under the Hollings CBDTPA," Felten wrote on the site. "If the CBDTPA passes, any new Billy Bass will have to incorporate government-approved copy-protection technology."

Slashdot | Your Rights Online - Fritz's Hit List.

wwwssabbsdotcom was one of several to submit news stories about Ed Felten's latest venture: Fritz's Hit List, a list of electronic devices with some sort of digital storage and processing capabilities sufficient to qualify them "digital media devices" under Sen. Hollings' CBDTPA bill.