The New York Times discusses the Google privacy case in Italy and the differences it highlights in how the United States and European nations view privacy rights. Recap: In September 2006, a video showing a disabled boy being harassed by classmates that was uploaded to Google Video’s Italian site. Google removed the video in November 2006 within 24 hours of a removal request being made. Prosecutors charged Google executives with defamation and violating the country’s privacy code. Last week, an Italian court found three Google executives guilty of violating the country’s privacy code and sentenced them to six-month suspended jail terms. Google is appealing.

In one sense, the ruling was a nice discussion starter about how much responsibility to place on services like Google for offensive content that they passively distribute.

But in a deeper sense, it called attention to the profound European commitment to privacy, one that threatens the American conception of free expression and could restrict the flow of information on the Internet to everyone. [...]

“The framework in Europe is of privacy as a human-dignity right,” said Nicole Wong, a lawyer with the company. “As enforced in the U.S., it’s a consumer-protection right.” Read more »

Security expert Bruce Schneier has an opinion column at CNN about surveillance cameras:

Pervasive security cameras don’t substantially reduce crime. This fact has been demonstrated repeatedly: in San Francisco, California, public housing; in a New York apartment complex; in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; in Washington; in study after study in both the U.S. and the U.K. Nor are they instrumental in solving many crimes after the fact.

There are exceptions, of course, and proponents of cameras can always cherry-pick examples to bolster their argument. These success stories are what convince us; our brains are wired to respond more strongly to anecdotes than to data. But the data are clear: CCTV cameras have minimal value in the fight against crime. Read more »

The Des Moines Register reports on a security breach of a state government database in Iowa that might leave residents vulnerable to identity theft.

[Sen. William Dotzler Jr.], a Waterloo Democrat, is a board member of the nonprofit Black Hawk County Gaming Association, a partner of the Isle Casino in Waterloo. He is among 80,000 people whose information in the licensing database of the Iowa Racing and Gaming Commission was compromised last month.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation have confirmed to The Des Moines Register they are seeking details of the Jan. 26 incident. State officials suspect the hacking originated in China, although they aren’t sure because cyber bandits often disguise their tracks. [...] Read more »

A few months ago, Texas announced that, as part of a lawsuit settlement agreement with the Texas Civil Rights Project, it would destroy five million blood samples taken from babies without their parents’ consent, a tactic that raised substantial privacy questions. Now, the Texas Tribune has learned, Texas officials also “were turning over hundreds of dried blood samples to the federal government to help build a vast DNA database.”

A Texas Tribune review of nine years’ worth of e-mails and internal documents on the Department of State Health Services’ newborn blood screening program reveals the transfer of hundreds of infant blood spots to an Armed Forces lab to build a national and, someday, international mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) registry. The records, released after the state agreed in December to destroy more than 5 million infant blood spots, also show an effort to limit the public’s knowledge of aspects of the newborn blood program, and to manage the debate around it. But the plaintiffs who filed the lawsuit never saw them, because the state settled the case so quickly that it never reached the discovery phase.

DSHS spokeswoman Carrie Williams says that while the department’s general philosophy was to save blood spots for public health research, “we did not have an exclusive policy.” She says DSHS participated in the project because officials believed it would help in missing-persons cases — and knew the blood spots could not be linked back to a particular individual. [...] Read more »

IDG News Service reports on another crackdown on Internet freedom by China. In January, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made a speech calling for global Internet freedom, linking it with other basic freedoms (worship, assembly, expression). Last year, the New York Times reported that the Chinese government secretly ordered news Web sites to require individuals to use their real names and identities when commenting on the sites. In 2008, Xinhua News Agency (which is controlled by the Chinese government) reported that China started photographing and identifying users of Beijing’s Internet cafes.

China has been seeking to require censorship software (called Green Dam-Youth Escort) be preinstalled on computers sold in the country. But, the software was plagued both by technical problems and bad publicity from privacy and civil liberties restrictions. China decided to postpone the mandatory preinstallation, but some computer makers are forging ahead anyway.

Now, IDG reports:

Web site owners in China will have to start submitting personal photos to register their sites with the government under new trial regulations, China’s latest move in an Internet clampdown focused on porn.

The regulations, issued by China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, are part of an ongoing effort by the ministry to create records for all Web sites in the country. They come amid a wide-ranging campaign against online porn in which China has also shut down thousands of Web sites and suspended registration of new Internet domain names by individuals. The campaign has even had an effect outside of China, where companies that sell domain names have been blocked from offering domains that end with the .cn country code. Read more »

“Three Google executives were convicted Wednesday of violating Italian privacy laws in a ruling that the company denounced as an ‘astonishing’ attack on freedom of expression on the Internet,” while a fourth executive was cleared, the New York Times reports. To recap: In September 2006, a video showing a disabled boy being harassed by classmates that was uploaded to Google Video’s Italian site. Google removed the video in November 2006 within 24 hours of a removal request being made. Last year, Italian authorities charged all four Google executives with defamation and three with failure to comply with Italian data privacy code.

The Google executives were found guilty of violating the Italian privacy code, but not of defamation. The three convicted are: Peter Fleischer, Google’s chief privacy counsel; David Drummond, senior vice president and chief legal officer; and George Reyes, a former chief financial officer. They could have faced a year in jail, but were given six-month suspended sentence. Senior product marketing manager Arvind Desikan faced only the defamation charge, so was cleared.

Richard Thomas, the United Kingdom’s former Information Commissioner, said the Italian court’s decision gave privacy laws a “bad name,” the BBC reports. “It is like prosecuting the post office for hate mail that is sent in the post … I find it worrying that the chief privacy officer who had nothing to do with the video has been found guilty. It is unrealistic to expect firms to monitor everything that goes online,” Thomas said.

In a posting on its official blog, Google said:

In essence this ruling means that employees of hosting platforms like Google Video are criminally responsible for content that users upload. We will appeal this astonishing decision because the Google employees on trial had nothing to do with the video in question. [...] Read more »