There will be two privacy panels at SXSWWeek 2010 in Austin, Texas.

Core Conversation: Big Brother on the Big Screen: Fact/Fiction?
Saturday, March 13 at 5:00 PM / Location: 8A
Can the NSA really do that? Um, yes. Join Nicole Ozer and Kevin Bankston at the movies to take a close look at how government surveillance has caught up with the fables dreamed up for Hollywood flicks like Enemy of the State, Minority Report, The Bourne Ultimatum, and The Dark Knight
Presenters: Nicole Ozer, ACLU of Northern California; Kevin Bankston, Electronic Frontier Foundation

Panel: My Life, Take Two: The Right to Delete
Sunday, March 14 at 11:00 AM / Location: Hilton K
Most of us have incidents in our past that we’d rather leave there–but that’s getting harder to do in a world teeming with tools and devices that capture our actions and record them forever. Do we have a “right to delete” records and data about ourselves? Can we? Should we?
Panelists: Chris Conley, ACLU of Northern California; Annalee Newitz (moderator), tech journalist/blogger and editor of io9.com; Marc Davis, Chief Scientist and co-founder of Invention Arts; Andrew McLaughlin, Deputy US Chief Technology Officer at Executive Office of the President and former Head of Global Public Policy for Google; Elly Jonez, Drupal developer and lifeblogger

Attorney Christopher Wolf writes about privacy rights and same-sex weddings in the District of Columbia in an op-ed for CNN.

Last week, D.C. was added to the list of those few states that permit gay marriage. A law passed in December and signed by the mayor went into effect when Congress (which has the power to reject D.C. laws) refrained from interfering.

Likewise, Chief Justice John Roberts refused an application to the U.S. Supreme Court to block the gay marriage law from going into effect, on procedural grounds, saying that the legal challenge was premature.

This should not be viewed as a ringing endorsement from the high court for gay marriage or for protecting the privacy rights of gay people.

Only two months ago, in January, the Supreme Court was not so hands-off in gay-marriage-related cases. Twice, the court intervened in cases in which active opponents of gay marriage, in California and Washington, have claimed that their right to privacy will be invaded if they are not given legal protection to be unseen and anonymous. [...] Read more »

The Canadian Press reports on the issue of patients’ medical data privacy and security after the death or retirement of a doctor.

Gary Dickson has seen abandoned medical records turn up in some pretty bizarre places in his time as Saskatchewan’s privacy commissioner – mouldy basements, drafty Quonset huts, vacant buildings.

He argues that more needs to be done to protect sensitive, personal health information left behind when a doctor retires or dies. Increasingly across Canada, he says, no appropriate arrangements have been made to turn records over to another doctor or to an approved archive. [...]

When a doctor dies in Saskatchewan, the representative of the estate – typically a widow or a child – has the same obligations the doctor had when it comes to records. But that person may not know what that entails, especially when it comes to keeping files secure or allowing patients access. [...] Read more »

NextGov reports on a presentation at the RSA Conference about privacy by security expert Bruce Schneier.

The session focused on the responsibilities that all generations currently hold to protect privacy and ensure individuals, not technological systems, have control.

Young people are used to living very public lives, Schneier said, but they also put a high priority on protecting their privacy. At the same time, while social networking sites appear to tout privacy, they deliberately make it difficult to be salient, he added. And as more and more children grow up around social networking, new social norms will be set. [...]

As a result, Schneier suggested that it’s the responsibility of all generations to come together to either accept the new balance of privacy that technology comes up with, or work to set the balance. [...]

“My prediction is that just as we today look back at the beginning of the previous century and wonder how the titans of industry could ignore pollution, our children are going to look at us on decisions we made about protecting privacy and giving individuals control,” Schneier said.

The Congressional Research Service (a nonpartisan department of the Library of Congress created to assist legislators) has published a report concerning the federal government’s information security capabilities and data privacy protections. The report, “Federal Information Security and Data Breach Notification Laws, RL34120 (Jan. 28, 2010)” is available through Open CRS. Not all CRS reports are made public, though the department is funded by taxpayer money. Open CRS, a project of the Center for Democracy & Technology, gathers and archives publicly accessible CRS Reports, ones that are already in the public domain. Here’s the summary:

The following report describes information security and data breach notification requirements included in the Privacy Act, the Federal Information Security Management Act, Office of Management and Budget Guidance, the Veterans Affairs Information Security Act, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, the Federal Trade Commission Act, and the Fair Credit Reporting Act. Also included in this report is a brief summary of the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), an industry regulation developed by VISA, MasterCard, and other bank card distributors. Read more »

In the New York Times magazine, there’s a story about how crowdsourcing is being used to unmask people online. There are questions about whether individual privacy is being violated, and in some cases, whether the “human-flesh search engines” are causing enabling violence.

Human-flesh search engines — renrou sousuo yinqing — have become a Chinese phenomenon: they are a form of online vigilante justice in which Internet users hunt down and punish people who have attracted their wrath. The goal is to get the targets of a search fired from their jobs, shamed in front of their neighbors, run out of town. It’s crowd-sourced detective work, pursued online — with offline results.

There is no portal specially designed for human-flesh searching; the practice takes place in Chinese Internet forums like Mop, where the term most likely originated. Searches are powered by users called wang min, Internet citizens, or Netizens. The word “Netizen” exists in English, but you hear its equivalent used much more frequently in China, perhaps because the public space of the Internet is one of the few places where people can in fact act like citizens. [...] Read more »