Saturday, January 28, is International Data Privacy Day. Take the time to think about how privacy is important in your life and how you can protect your rights from being infringed upon. Please also take the time to donate to any number of organizations out there trying to protect your privacy rights.

Visit the official site to find events near your area. Here are a few highlights in the United States and internationally:

Alabama

On Friday, Jan. 27, Cumberland School of Law hosts “Is My Phone Spying On Me or Am I Just An Open Book? An Exploration of Privacy and Mobile Technology.” It will be “a discussion on the legal, ethical, and commercial implications of mobile technology on privacy. Featuring privacy professionals from business, law practice, and the academy, this panel will explore the state of privacy law with respect to mobile technology, the tension between privacy and the utility of data collected from mobile technology, and how organizations handle data collected and transmitted using mobile technology.” Time and location: 10 a.m. to 11 a.m. at Cumberland School of Law at Samford University. For more information: http://cumberland.samford.edu/content/my-phone-spying-me

North Carolina

On Friday, Feb. 3, the UNC School of Information and Library Science and the American Library Association will host “Should Librarians Care About Privacy Anymore?” The free panel/webinar “will feature presentations and panel discussion by Barbara Jones, director of the American Library Association Office for Intellectual Freedom, Anne Klinefelter, associate professor of Law and director of the UNC at Chapel Hill Law Library, Christopher (Cal) Lee, SILS associate professor, Zeynep Tufekci, SILS associate professor, and SILS Dean, Gary Marchionini, as moderator.” Time and location: 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. at 08 Peabody Hall, UNC Chapel Hill2 and streaming via webinar. For more information: http://sils.unc.edu/events/2012/data-privacy-webinar  Read more »

BBC News reports on a privacy breach by mobile phone company O2, which apologized to customers in a blog post. BBC News reports:

O2 has apologised for a technical problem which caused users’ phone numbers to be disclosed when using its mobile data.

The company said it normally only passed numbers to “trusted partners”.

A problem during routine maintenance meant that from 10 January numbers could have been seen by other websites.

“We investigated, identified and fixed it this afternoon. We would like to apologise for the concern we have caused,” the company said.

The Information Commissioner’s Office had said that it would speak to O2 “to better understand what has happened”. [...] Read more »

The European Commission announced a proposal for a comprehensive reform of the EU’s 1995 Data Protection Directive. In a press release, the Commission explained:

Technological progress and globalisation have profoundly changed the way our data is collected, accessed and used. In addition, the 27 EU Member States have implemented the 1995 rules differently, resulting in divergences in enforcement. A single law will do away with the current fragmentation and costly administrative burdens, leading to savings for businesses of around €2.3 billion a year. The initiative will help reinforce consumer confidence in online services, providing a much needed boost to growth, jobs and innovation in Europe. [...]

The Commission’s proposals update and modernise the principles enshrined in the 1995 Data Protection Directive to guarantee privacy rights in the future. They include a policy Communication setting out the Commission’s objectives and two legislative proposals: a Regulation setting out a general EU framework for data protection and a Directive on protecting personal data processed for the purposes of prevention, detection, investigation or prosecution of criminal offences and related judicial activities.

Key changes in the reform include:

• A single set of rules on data protection, valid across the EU. Unnecessary administrative requirements, such as notification requirements for companies, will be removed. This will save businesses around €2.3 billion a year. Read more »

Deutsche Welle reports on the use by Germany of a commercial spyware program that has also been used by Egypt under Hosni Mubarak, who was ousted as president last year:

Germany’s federal criminal agency, the BKA, is testing at least one commercial spyware program, FinSpy, delivered through the German subsidiary of Britain’s Gamma International.

FinSpy was exposed last year as being a surveillance application that was used in Mubarak’s Egypt. It infects computers by fooling targets into installing a fake update for iTunes on desktop computers, or even a spoof download for BlackBerry mobile phones. Then, the application can provide surveillance through the computer’s own webcam and microphone, and download files without being detected.

This revelation comes three months after the German government admitted to using an software surveillance tool after a Berlin hacker group announced it had found serious flaws in that application.

The German government confirmed the use of the commercial surveillance software last week in a response to an inquiry by Green Party parliamentarian, Konstantin von Notz, a representative from Mölln, outside of Hamburg, in northern Germany. [...] Read more »

Yesterday, Privacy Lives joined others in going dark in protest of the U.S. Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT IP Act (PIPA). The groups include major sites such as Google, Wikipedia and the Internet Archive (pdf), as well as arts groups such as the Association of Performing Arts Presenters, Dance/USA, Fractured Atlas and National Alliance for Media Art and Culture, and groups such as Doctors Without Borders, the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the Online News Association and Global Voices. Civil liberties and privacy groups such as Public Knowledge and the Electronic Frontier Foundation also joined the protest.

Why did such a variety of groups speak out against SOPA and PIPA? Simply put: The bills would allow copyright owners to get court orders to block not just content that infringes on their copyrights but copyright owners could block entire Web sites and the bills would allow the U.S. attorney general to block content or Web sites that the Justice Department determines is engaging in criminal copyright infringement. Court orders under SOPA/PIPA would mean: Internet Service Providers would be required to prevent access to the sites, U.S. search engines would have to remove links to the Web sites from their indexes, and payment service firms (PayPal, credit card companies) would be required to cut off funding for the Web sites. And Web sites would have few ways to effectively appeal these court orders.

Privacy Lives and other protesting groups are not supporting theft of intellectual property or copyright infringement. The problem is that the legislation is so broadly written that, as Public Knowledge explains it: “They sweep in every site that includes links, not just the ‘worst of the worst.’ PIPA applies to ‘information location tools,’ a comically over-broad legal concept that includes things such as a ‘directory, index, reference, pointer, or hypertext link.’ Policing every link on a site is an impossible burden for even the best intentioned site.” And EFF says that: “Broad immunity provisions (combined with a threat of litigation) would encourage service providers to overblock innocent users or even block websites voluntarily. This gives content companies every incentive to create unofficial blacklists of websites, which service providers would be under pressure to block without regard to the First Amendment. [...] SOPA gives the government new powers to go after sites that provide information about tools that might be used to bypass the blacklists — even though these are often the same tools used by democratic activists around the world to bypass Internet censorship mechanisms implemented by authoritarian governments like Iran and China.”

Speak out against SOPA and PIPA. Join in the protest to protect our civil liberties. You can sign up at Public Knowledge or EFF. If you can, donate to these groups so they can continue to fight for your rights.

Last year, it was reported that police in the Netherlands used GPS data from TomTom to catch people who speed, and Dutch officials began investigating this use of the technology. Now, Reuters reports that TomTom says it has been cleared in the investigation by Dutch data protection officials:

TomTom said on Thursday an official probe had cleared it of accusations that it violated Dutch data protection laws by sharing its customers’ individual location and traffic information with third parties, including Dutch police.

The Dutch navigation equipment and map maker came under scrutiny in April after reportedly selling information gathered through its customers’ personal navigation devices (PND) in their cars, to third parties, without their consent. [...] Read more »