Consumers have until Sunday to add their phone numbers to the 41.7 million already on a list to block telemarketing calls starting Oct. 1.

K. Dane Snowden, chief of the Federal Communications Commission's consumer and government affairs bureau, said those who sign up for the do-not-call list after this weekend likely will have to wait until early next year before calls are blocked.

There will not be enough time to process requests received after Sunday to add numbers to the first national do-not-call list, and telemarketers, once they check the names Oct. 1, won't have to look again for another three months, Snowden said.

Telemarketers have asked the federal courts to block the new rules, saying they violate their free speech rights. The case is pending.

The Federal Trade Commission is administering the list, while both the FCC and FTC are enforcing it. The list has proven extremely popular with consumers, with officials saying they expect it to contain up to 60 million phone numbers by the end of the year.

Remember the list can be found at Do Not Call. Sign-up now or three more months of telemarketter hell.

ejbst25 writes "The first wave of the do not call registry sign up ends 8/31. There is plenty of news coverage but they say there is already over 41 million numbers registered."

A group of academics and business executives is planning to introduce next month a next-generation bar code system, which could someday replace with a microchip the series of black vertical lines found on most merchandise.

The so-called EPC Network, which has been under development at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for nearly five years, will make its debut in Chicago on Sept. 15, at the EPC Symposium. At that event, MIT researchers, executives from some of the largest global companies, and U.S. government officials intend to discuss their plans for the EPC Network and invite others to join the conversation.

The attendee list for the conference reads like a who's who of the Fortune 500: Colgate-Palmolive, General Mills, GlaxoSmithKline, Heinz, J.C. Penney, Kraft Foods, Nestle, PepsiCo and Sara Lee, among others. An official from the Pentagon is scheduled to speak, along with executives from Gillette, Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble and United Parcel Service.

[ ... ]

EPC stands for electronic product code, which is the new product numbering scheme that's at the heart of the system.

There are several key differences between an EPC and a bar code. First, the EPC is designed to provide a unique serial number for every item in the system. By contrast, bar codes only identify groups of products. So, all cans of Diet Coke have the same bar code more or less. Under EPC, every can of Coke would have a one-of-a-kind identifier. Retailers and consumer-goods companies think a one-of-a-kind product code could help them to reduce theft and counterfeit goods and to juggle inventory more effectively.

The way it's been designed, an EPC can be linked to databases that can store much more information about a particular product than is possible with the bar code. In addition to price and manufacturer, the EPC could link to information about location of an item based on a complex system of readers and microchips, or "tags," that communicate via radio frequency, a concept known as radio frequency identification (RFID).

[ ... ]

Another feature of the EPC is its 96-bit format, which some say is large enough to generate a unique code for every grain of rice on the planet. "Every molecule on Earth is what the MIT boys said," Abell said.

A California consumer advocate will expose how President Bush was reneging on campaign pledges by quietly backing federal legislation to override new state privacy laws. California enacted such a privacy law, to be signed by Governor Gray Davis on Wednesday, that allows consumers to stop the broad trade of private financial information between corporations and their affiliates.

"President Bush will have to choose between the commercial freedoms of corporations and the privacy rights of Americans," said Jamie Court, author of "Corporateering: How Corporate Power Steals Yours Personal Freedoms And What You Can Do About It" (Tarcher/Putnam). "Banks and insurers should not be able to go to Washington as an end-run around the most protective state privacy laws. The President should realize his campaign pledges to protect Americans' privacy are needed more than ever when I can buy the social security number of "CIA" director George Tenet on the Internet for as little as $26."

Court, the executive director of the Santa Monica-based Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights (FTCR), pointed to the Administration's support this summer for ongoing federal preemption of new state privacy laws under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, a clause due to expire January 1.

That policy, promoted by banks and insurers, is embodied in HR 2622 -- which prevents states from having the authority to stop banks and insurers from trafficking in individuals' private information with their many affiliates. The hardly-noticed legislation passed out of the House Financial Services Committee in late July and will be on a fast track after Labor Day.

California's new privacy law allows consumers to prevent the trade in their private financial information among corporate affiliates not in the same line of business, such as between banks and insurers. That protection would be superceded by HR 2622. Court said limiting affiliates' access to private information is critical to protecting Americans' privacy because large corporations today broadly affiliate. Citigroup, for example, has 1700 affiliates who, under current federal law, cannot be stopped from trading individuals' private information, even when a consumer explicitly says no.

California's privacy revolution registered a major victory Aug. 18, as organizers announced they were prepared to place a financial privacy protection initiative on the state ballot if the Legislature failed to act within 24 hours.

My colleagues rose to the occasion by practically hand-carrying to the governor my SB1, a financial privacy protection measure that had been victimized by special-interest politics for four years. Realizing that voters would approve the March 2004 ballot initiative, the financial industry minimized its opposition to the bill, which it considered more workable than the stricter initiative.

Even so, SB1 is the strongest financial privacy measure in the nation, according to both consumer advocates and bankers. The measure, effective July 1, 2004, will require financial institutions to secure an individual's permission before sharing his/her financial data with an outside company; allow consumers to stop the sharing of information within a corporation's "family of companies"; and require that consumers receive clear, understandable notices that explain how to control their financial information.

Financial institutions in California make almost a billion dollars a year from the sharing and selling of consumers' private financial information, almost always without the knowledge or approval of account holders. This wholesale information trading has fueled the epidemic of identity theft that, according to a recent Privacy and American Business survey, has affected more than 13 million people since 2001.

It is astonishing that such monumental efforts were needed to establish what 90 percent of Californians strongly believe: that they, and they alone, should have ultimate control over their most private financial information. Californians cherish privacy -- half the residential phone numbers in our state are unlisted. Most people would not give their personal information to friends, let alone a telemarketer or a complete stranger. Yet it happens every day under a weak federal law.

Now lobbyists for banks and insurers are converging on our nation's capital to erase the gains we've made in California. The special interests' strategy is to amend the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act so that part of SB1 would be trumped by weaker federal rules.

Gov. Gray Davis signed California's landmark financial-privacy bill yesterday, wrapping up a year-long effort by State Sen. Jackie Speier and California consumers.

It was a long-awaited moment, and Speier's SB 1 bill will now give individuals the clout to forbid banks and other financial institutions to trade personal financial information without prior written permission.

Now comes an even bigger challenge in the fight to preserve what's left of our financial privacy.

Legislation that is now moving through Congress would pre-empt important portions of state privacy laws in favor of potentially weaker federal legislation. In fact, a committee of the House of Representatives has already approved changes to the Fair Credit Reporting Act that would do just that.

California's SB 1 would go into effect July 1, 2004, and existing federal laws that override more stringent state regulations expire on Jan. 1.

U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer is already well aware of just how critically important this issue is to Californians and has started efforts in the Senate to enable stronger state laws to stay in place if federal laws are renewed after January.

For the first time, agencies must submit privacy assessments of their major IT systems with their business cases, a senior administration official said.

Dan Chenok, the Office of Management and Budget’s branch chief for Information, Policy and Technology, today said the E-Government Act of 2002 requires agencies to analyze the potential impact of new IT systems or new collections of personal information. OMB expanded that mandate in a recent memo to agencies on implementing the law to include new IT investments and all online information collections.

“Last year we strongly recommended agencies perform privacy assessments, but we didn’t require them,” Chenok said at a breakfast meeting sponsored by Federal Sources Inc. of McLean, Va. “Not a whole lot of agencies did them. We are working with agencies this year to make sure they get done, because with any new requirement, there always is a need for extra assistance.”

SEATTLE -- A federal judge has blocked the state from enforcing new telephone privacy rules, granting a victory to Verizon Corp., which had argued that the rules encroached on its free-speech rights.

The rules, which took effect Jan. 1 but were suspended by court order in February, barred telephone companies from selling customers' calling records or using them to market anything but telecommunications services without customers' permission.

U.S. District Judge Barbara Rothstein agreed in her Aug. 26 ruling that there is a substantial state interest "in protecting against the unconsented use" of sensitive "call-detail" information, which includes when, where and to whom a call is placed, and how long calls last.

But she also said the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission's regulations failed to adequately advance that interest and that they could have been more narrowly tailored. Therefore, she held, the regulations run afoul of Verizon's First Amendment rights to communicate with its 700,000 customers in the state.

The ruling makes permanent a temporary order Rothstein issued in the case in February.

Privacy campaigners are urging people not to participate in a Home Office biometric passport trial due to take place this year.

Home Office officials have confirmed that the UK Passport Service intends to run a trial of biometric testing, in an as yet unnamed town with a population of around 10,000.

A spokeswoman for the Home Office told vnunet.com that the trial would help establish the efficacy of methods such as fingerprint reading, iris scanning and facial recognition in verifying identity.

The trial is intended to speed the introduction of new passports. But privacy campaigners have warned that it will be used to push through the government's controversial plans for a national identity card, and have urged people not to participate.

"Without cooperation, the trial cannot proceed. So my advice is: don't participate," said Ian Brown, director of the Foundation for Information Policy Research.

The government will need to introduce new legislation before it can introduce ID cards, but it could use the biometric passport trial to prove the technology.

The Home Office has been reluctant to release details of the trial. But a spokeswoman confirmed that it would not be based on passport renewals, meaning that the public would be asked to submit biometric data voluntarily.

When asked why the public would do so, the Home Office spokeswoman replied: "For the good of the future passport service."

Researchers at a major security firm have developed a blocking technique to ease privacy concerns surrounding controversial radio frequency identification technology.

The labs at RSA Security on Wednesday outlined plans for a technology they call blocker tags, which are similar in size and cost to radio frequency identification (RFID) tags but disrupt the transmission of information to scanning devices and thwart the collection of data.

The technique, one of few RFID-blocking technologies being worked on by researchers, is still a concept in the labs. But the next step is to develop prototype chips and see if manufacturers are interested in making the processors, according to Ari Juels, a principal research scientist with RSA Laboratories. Blocker and RFID tags are about the size of a grain of sand and cost around 10 cents.