The U.S. and the European Union reached a preliminary deal to allow data about Europeans to be stored on U.S. soil, heading off a growing threat to thousands of companies' trans-Atlantic operations.

The rising power and prominence of the nation's loudest, meanest voices obscures what most of us personally experience: Most people are sane and generous -- and too busy to tweet. It turns out, you're right. We dug into the data and found that, in fact, most Americans are friendly, donate time or money, and would help you shovel your snow. They are busy, normal and mostly silent. These aren't the people with big Twitter followings or cable-news contracts -- and they don't try to pick fights at school board meetings. So the people who get the clicks and the coverage distort our true reality.

Truth Social, a new social media platform backed by former President Donald Trump, sat at the top of Apple's free apps download charts.

The platform unveiled a soft launch late Sunday, according to Reuters, with many users prompted to join a waitlist. Some who tried to sign up reported glitches when attempting to create an account, though such issues are common in early app releases. Truth Social has been delayed several times. The full launch was first planned for Feb. 21, but that date has been pushed back to March 31.

U.S. federal agencies have been using a 35-year-old American surveillance law to secretly track WhatsApp users with no explanation as to why and without knowing whom they are targeting. In Ohio, a just-unsealed government surveillance application reveals that in November 2021, DEA investigators demanded the Facebook-owned messaging company track seven users based in China and Macau. The application reveals the DEA didn't know the identities of any of the targets, but told WhatsApp to monitor the IP addresses and numbers with which the targeted users were communicating, as well as when and how they were using the app. Such surveillance is done using a technology known as a pen register and under the 1986 Pen Register Act, and doesn't seek any message content, which WhatsApp couldn't provide anyway, as it is end-to-end encrypted.

If you’re getting health care in the U.S., chances are your providers are now trying to give you a better patient experience through a website called MyChart. This is supposed to be yours, as the first person singular pronoun My implies. Problem is, it’s TheirChart. And there are a lot of them.

May the government restrict DeFi (decentralized finance) tools, and force people to use third-party intermediaries, precisely to take advantage of the extra surveillance power that the third-party doctrine would provide? This question has taken on added importance in the context of emerging web3 technologies, with implications for coders, customers, and entrepreneurs.

The draft report offers recommendations for stakeholders about using digital health hardware and software to gather information from remote trial participants - in other words: telehealth is increasingly accepted even in clinical trial.

The United States and the United Kingdom today announced plans to collaborate on bilateral innovation prize challenges focused on advancing privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs). This emerging group of technologies present an important opportunity to harness the power of data in a manner that protects privacy and intellectual property, enabling cross-border and cross-sector collaboration to solve shared challenges.
Announced during the Summit for Democracy, as part of a series of International Grand Challenges on Democracy-Affirming Technologies, the prize challenges will take place during the Summit’s “year of action,” accelerating work to overcome technical gaps and adoption challenges related to PETs. By bringing together top minds from both countries on building viable solutions, the prize challenges will aim to help mature and facilitate adoption of these promising technologies.

This publication from the US Homeland Security provides information for how individuals can be resilient to harmful or false narratives in the online space and effective when consuming and sharing information online. The resource provides definitions of the various types of misleading information, offers recommendations for approaching digital content, and lists further educational and programmatic resources.

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy is developing principles to guard against powerful technologies—with input from the public.

As the future of our healthcare system moves towards electronic healthcare records, we need patient data ownership rights to protect patient care.

Senate Democrats are calling on the Federal Trade Commission to write new rules to protect consumer data privacy in a new letter to the agency authored on Monday.

Copies of the "field interview cards" that police complete when they question civilians reveal that LAPD officers are instructed to record a civilian's Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other social media accounts, alongside basic biographical information. An internal memo further shows that the police chief, Michel Moore, told employees that it was critical to collect the data for use in "investigations, arrests, and prosecutions," and warned that supervisors would review cards to ensure they were complete.

On Thursday, a judge ruled that Apple will have to continue fighting a lawsuit brought by users in federal court in California, alleging that the company's voice assistant Siri has improperly recorded private conversations. He ruled that the plaintiffs, who are trying to make the suit a class action case, could continue pursuing claims that Siri turned on unprompted and recorded conversations that it shouldn't have and passed the data along to third parties, therefore violating user privacy. The case is one of several that have been brought against Apple, Google and Amazon that involve allegations of violation of privacy by voice assistants.

Covid exposed the fragmented reality of US health records. Now an effort to bring together data from millions of patients starting to show results.

Police makes 112,000 data requests in 6 months: When U.S. law enforcement officials need to cast a wide net for information, they're increasingly turning to the vast digital ponds of personal data created by Big Tech companies via the devices and online services that have hooked billions of people around the world.

The Colorado Legislature recently passed the Colorado Privacy Act (“ColoPA”), joining Virginia and California as states with comprehensive privacy legislation. The good news is that, in broad terms, ColoPA generally does not impose significant new requirements that aren’t addressed under the CCPA or VCDPA.

A federal lawsuit has been filed against Pennsylvania and a vendor contracted by the state's Department of Health (DOH) over a data breach that exposed the personal health information (PHI) of thousands of Pennsylvanians.

It seems that in the United States, at least, app developers and advertisers who rely on targeted mobile advertising for revenue are seeing their worst fears realized: Analytics data published this week suggests that US users choose to opt out of tracking 96 percent of the time in the wake of iOS 14.5.

If the United States does not shape new rules for the digital age, others will. China, for example, is promulgating its own techno-authoritarian model, recognizing that shaping the rules of digital power is a key component of geopolitical competition.

Andy Slavitt (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services) said during a White House COVID-19 briefing: "[...] the government here is not viewing its role as the place to create a passport, nor a place to hold the data of citizens. We view this as something that the private sector is doing and will do. What's important to us, and we're leading an interagency process right now to go through these details, are that some important criteria be met with these credentials."

More corona news discussed on Slack:

• World leaders call for international pandemic treaty
  
• Indigenous Peoples' Data During COVID-19: From External to Internal
  
• New York rolls out COVID-19 passports based on IBM blockchain technology

On 16 July 2020, the European Court of Justice issued the Schrems II judgement with significant implications for the use of US cloud services. Customers of US cloud service providers must now themselves verify the data protection laws of the recipient country, document its risk assessment and confer with its customers. This article will explain what the Schrems II judgement entails for your business.

Data modernization is the next step in the agency’s overhaul of its approach to technology and data, and we are pleased today to announce the Data Modernization Action Plan.

Data modernization is the next step in the agency’s overhaul of its approach to technology and data, and we are pleased today to announce the Data Modernization Action Plan.

Data modernization is the next step in the agency’s overhaul of its approach to technology and data, and we are pleased today to announce the Data Modernization Action Plan.

But how do Americans feel about data privacy? According to Pew Research, they do not trust governments and companies to do the right thing with data. A 2019 survey found 81% of people feel they have very little or no control over data collected by companies, while 84% felt the same about government.

This article argues that de-anonymizing the data "gets easier by the day," warning this latest data set demonstrates "the looming threat to our liberties posed by a surveillance economy that monetizes the movements of the righteous and the wicked alike."

The optional nine-digit social security number (SSN) is at the core of every American’s administrative identity — and it is also a major attack vector for most kinds of financial fraud.

This Special Publication outlines a number of potentially valuable policy changes and actions that will help drive toward effective, efficient, and ethical data sharing, including more compelling and widespread communication efforts to improve awareness, understanding, and participation in data sharing.

The president-elect has hired both Jessica Hertz, former associate general counsel at Facebook, and Cynthia Hogan, former Apple vice-president for government affairs, to his transition team. Eric Schmidt, the former Google chief executive, has been a big fundraiser, and is being talked about to lead a new technology industry task force in the White House.

The New Yorker on the mobile app for Donald Trump’s reëlection campaign, which was developed by the ad broker and software company Phunware, and how it gathers users’ data in an invasive way reminiscent of the methods of Cambridge Analytica.

Amid sometimes violent protests and counter-protests around racial justice, this week Portland, Oregon legislators unanimously passed groundbreaking new legislation to ban the use of facial recognition technology, which some see as a victory for civil rights and digital justice. The ban covers use of the technology in both privately owned places as well as by city agencies. Another story reports that Amazon spent $24.000 to kill Portland's facial recognition ban.

A European Union privacy regulator has sent Facebook a preliminary order to suspend data transfers to the U.S. about its EU users, WSJ reported Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter, an operational and legal challenge for the company that could set a precedent for other tech giants.

Las Vegas casinos, open for months now, are a likely hotbed for the spread of COVID-19. For many reasons, contact tracing has proved next to impossible as tourists return to homes across the U.S.

San Diego equipped 3200 of its street lights with cameras and sensors with no governance or oversight…. Smart Cities turned to Panopticon Cities…

The EU's Court of Justice has just invalidated the "Privacy Shield" data sharing system between the EU and the US, because of overreaching US surveillance.

Minnesota officials say they’re using contact tracing to better understand who the protestors are and where they’re coming from.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has finalized two long-awaited sets of rules that will govern how providers, payers and technology vendors must design their systems to give patients safe and secure access to their digital health data.

The California Consumer Privacy Act gives Californians some control over their data, but only if they know how to take advantage of it.

EU regulators must make more effort to stop tech companies from transferring data to countries with weaker data-protection standards, an advisor to the European Union’s top court said Thursday. It’s the latest in a lengthy and complex legal case involving an Austrian privacy campaigner and Facebook.

Your quick rundown to US politics and data rights: Presidential candidates agree that americans should have more control over their data than they do now.

Privacy is big question, as governments seek access to DNA data.

If you’re white, live in the United States, and a distant relative has uploaded their DNA to a public ancestry database, there’s a good chance an internet sleuth can identify you from a DNA sample you left somewhere.

The United States Department of Defense (DoD) enduring challenge is to retain a technological and military advantage while upholding and promoting democratic values, working with our allies, and contributing to a stable, peaceful international community. DoD’s development and use of artificial intelligence (AI) reflects this challenge.
The Defense Innovation Board (DIB) recommends five AI ethics principles for adoption by DoD, which in shorthand are: responsible, equitable, traceable, reliable, and governable. These principles and a set of recommended actions in support of them are described in this document.

US Senator Ron Wyden has come out with a radical new privacy bill that will prevent tech giants from selling and misusing data by holding them accountable.

Andrew Yang (2020 US Presidential Candidate from the Democrats): Our data is ours - or it should be. At this point our data is more valuable than oil. If anyone benefits from our data it should be us. I would make data a property right that each of us shares.

A US senator wants to oblige big tech to declare to users how much they make with personal data.