UPDATED to add a link to a joint U.S.-EU statement on privacy released at the conference, “EU-U.S. joint statement on data protection by European Commission Vice-President Viviane Reding and U.S. Secretary of Commerce John Bryson.“

The European Commission’s Director-General for Justice and the EU Delegation to the USA in Washington, D.C., is holding an all-day conference in Washington and Brussels (via video links) concerning privacy and the protection of personal information. There is a web stream available, and I urge you to watch. The speakers include many high-ranking EU and US officials working on privacy and data protection, as well as people from corporations and nongovernmental organizations. The first panel is “Privacy protection – approaches to addressing similar challenges in different legal systems and traditions.”

The panelists have discussed the need for “privacy protection by design” as well as the U.S.-EU negotiations over data-sharing. Several panelists discussed the similarities between the EU and US approaches to reforming data-protection rules, especially focusing on consumer protection rules. The Commerce Department’s Danny Weitzner discussed the agency’s recent report (pdf) concerning a “Privacy Bill of Rights.” The Federal Trade Commission’s David Vladeck says his agency’s privacy report will be out soon, and the statements and reports from the EU and US has shown “a high degree of convergence on basic values” and consumers must be given “clear controls” to allow for “meaningful choice.”

Notably, a person who was not an EU or US official, European Digital Rights‘ Douwe Korff, highlighted that there are many difference between the EU and U.S. on data privacy protection. “To date, the U.S. falls far short” of European privacy laws, he said. Yes, there are convergences on some kinds of consumer protection, but the “real challenges” includes the massive data collection and mingling of private and public sector data. Also, there are open questions and challenges over the “blurring of the lines” between private sector and law enforcement data collection and use, Korff said.

The web stream is here.

The New York University Information Law Institute and the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy will hold a day-long event, “Mobile and Location Privacy: A Technology and Policy Dialog.” The groups say, “The age of ubiquitous computing is here. People routinely carry smartphones and other devices capable of recording and transmitting immense quantities of personal information and tracking their every move. Privacy has suffered in this new environment, with new reports every week of vulnerabilities and unintended disclosures of private information. On Friday, April 13, 2012, New York University’s Information Law Institute and Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy will host a technology and policy dialogue about the new world of mobile and location privacy. The gathering aims to bring together the policy and technology communities to discuss the substantial privacy issues arising from the growth of mobile and location technologies. The conference will combine a variety of formats, including roundtable discussions on specific topics, a keynote address, and a technology demonstration.”

There will be three roundtable discussions and the featured speakers are: “Edward Felten (Federal Trade Commission, Princeton University, Center for Information Technology Policy) will deliver a keynote address to spark the cross-disciplinary dialog, and Ashkan Soltanti (Independent Researcher) will demonstrate key technological elements of mobile and location privacy.” Registration is necessary.

Date: Friday, April 13, 2012 at 9:30 a.m. ET
Location: Lipton Hall, 108 West 3rd Street [between Sullivan & MacDougal Streets]; New York University School of Law; New York City
For more information: https://citp.princeton.edu/event/mobile-and-location-privacy/

Ars Technica reports on cases concerning warrantless access to cellphone location data:

Courts all over the country have been wrestling with this question, and the government has been on something of a winning streak. While one court ruled last year that such information requests violate the Fourth Amendment, most others have reached the opposite conclusion.

The Obama administration laid out its position in a legal brief last month, arguing that customers have “no privacy interest” in CSLR held by a network provider. Under a legal principle known as the “third-party doctrine,” information voluntarily disclosed to a third party ceases to enjoy Fourth Amendment protection. The government contends that this rule applies to cell phone location data collected by a network provider. Read more »

CNN reports on a lawsuit in Minnesota concerning a sixth-grade student’s privacy and alleged actions by a school:

A Minnesota middle school student, with the backing of the American Civil Liberties Union, is suing her school district over a search of her Facebook and e-mail accounts by school employees.

The 12-year-old sixth grade student, identified in court documents only as R.S., was on two occasions punished for statements she made on her Facebook account, and was also pressured to divulge her password to school officials, the complaint states.

“R.S. was intimidated, frightened, humiliated and sobbing while she was detained in the small school room” as she watched a counselor, a deputy, and another school employee pore over her private communications. Read more »

At Wired, Stanford’s Ryan Calo has an opinion column about privacy and the use of aerial drones (also known as unmanned aerial vehicles, “UAVs”) to conduct surveillance in the United States. Congress recently approved the FAA reauthorization bill, which includes a provision to integrate the use of aerial surveillance by drones in the United States by Sept. 30, 2015, rather than keeping the drones for their original purpose flying in combat missions.

The ACLU has released a report on this technology, “Protecting Privacy From Aerial Surveillance: Recommendations for Government Use of Drone Aircraft” (pdf). The Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed a lawsuit against the Department of Transportation to learn more about the use of drones in the United States. And the Center for Democracy and Technology has looked into the privacy issues that can arise from commercial and domestic law enforcement use of drones.

Calo writes:

Just in case you haven’t seen the memo: Drones are coming to a city near you. They are arriving on these shores by the hundreds after serving in war zones overseas, and plenty of new models are on order to meet a burgeoning domestic demand. [...]

The FAA’s primary concern is safety; carelessly deployed drones might literally crash your dinner party or collide with other aircraft in the already crowded skies. But civil-liberty groups are worried about what they see as a greater danger: the specter of massive surveillance. [...] Read more »

Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.), chairman of the subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law of the Senate Judiciary Committee, writes about privacy and civil liberties in an opinion column at Wired. Franken has sought answers from Apple and Google about the recent controversy concerning researchers’ revelations about the tracking and storage of users’ location data on Apple iPhones and 3G-enabled iPad tablets, as well controversy over devices using Google’s Android devices. And he has written to Carrier IQ demanding answers about reports about how smartphone users’ data could be quietly gathered and used by companies via a service from Carrier IQ. Now, Franken writes:

When people talked about protecting their privacy when I was growing up, they were talking about protecting it from the government. They talked about unreasonable searches and seizures, about keeping the government out of their bedrooms. They talked about whether the government was trying to keep tabs on the books they read or the rallies they attended. Over the last 40 or 50 years, we’ve seen a fundamental shift in who has our information and what they’re doing with it. That’s not to say that we still shouldn’t be worried about protecting ourselves from government abuses. But now, we also have relationships with large corporations that are obtaining, storing — and in many cases, sharing (and selling) — enormous amounts of our personal information.

When the Constitution was written, the founders had no way of anticipating the new technologies that would evolve in the coming centuries. [...] The founders had no idea that one day the police would be able to remotely track your movements through a GPS device, and so the Supreme Court ruled in January, in United States v. Jones, that this was also a search that required court approval.

All of this is a good thing: Our laws need to reflect the evolution of technology and the changing expectations of American society. This is why the Constitution is often called a “living” document. Read more »