The Week in Privacy

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1.  Behavioral Targeting before Congress. On Thursday, the House subcommittee on communication and consumer protection held a hearing on the data collection practices of Internet companies. The Wall Street Journal reports that, “Lawmakers in the House are drafting Internet-privacy legislation designed to provide consumers more information about what is being collected online and to give them greater control about how that data can be used. It could also set rules for how consumers could prevent their personal data from being shared with advertisers.” Microsoft's Privacy Principles for Live Search and Online Ad Targeting are here.

2. Rouge Employees, Hackers Most to Blame for ID Theft. The Washington Post reports on the new figures from the Identity Theft Resource Center. “The ID Theft Center found that of the roughly 250 data breaches publicly reported in the United States between Jan. 1 and Jun. 12, victims blamed the largest share of incidents on theft by employees (18.4 percent) and hacking (18 percent). Taken together, breaches attributed to these two types of malicious attacks have increased about 10 percent over the same period in 2008.”

3. Center for Democracy & Technology calls for Locaction-Enabled Web Privacy. A new blog post from CDT’s Alissa Cooper states that: “It’s CDT’s belief that location information should only be used on individual Internet users’ own terms. Individuals should get to decide with whom they share their location, what that information is used for, whether or not it gets shared, and how long it’s retained. Location-enabled technologies – including Web browsers – should be designed with privacy in mind from the beginning and with built-in user controls to allow individuals to manage their location data as it’s collected.

4. Google Reaches Agreement with German Government on Street View Data. Spiegel reports that, “The dispute between Google and the data protection office in Hamburg over the company's Street View service has been settled. Google has agreed to erase identifiable raw data depicting people, property or cars upon request.”