The Chevrolet Vega of 1975 came equipped with an electronic control unit underneath the hood. Through a network of sensors this unit monitored the vehicle’s essential systems: throttle position, idle speed, coolant temperature and most importantly, the fuel injection system — a first for an American car. The device synthesized the data and adjusted these systems to achieve maximum efficiency. It functioned inconspicuously—no dashboard touch screen or “driver interface” — and it was purely self-contained. Neither the control unit nor the Vega communicated with the outside ... Read More
Securing Nebulous Privacy Rights in the Cloud
December 1, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
The swelling of the online data “cloud” is driving an info-privacy cold war between U.S. tech companies demanding freer movement of data in cyberspace, and European Union states that want the amorphous cloud better regulated. Is there a middle way? In April 2010, the German government faced off with Facebook when the latter said it would sell its private user data to third parties. “What is private must stay private,” Ilse Aigner, the German minister of consumer protection, stated plainly in a letter to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. “Unfortunately, Facebook ignores this ... Read More
Smart Grid Challenges Individual Privacy
June 17, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
If we ever get a national smart grid off the ground, as the Obama Administration envisioned this week in its newly released "Policy Framework for the 21st-Century Grid," the U.S. could address myriad policy problems with a single new set of infrastructure. With a smart grid, we could reduce energy consumption to the benefit of the environment. We could save money — and gas — on the meter readers who drive around manually recording your electricity consumption. We could better manage blackouts. We could direct energy to where it's needed most in the event of a crisis. We could even use ... Read More
Can Privacy, Electronic Medical Records Coexist?
June 15, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
The stimulus bill passed in 2009 set aside $27 billion to encourage doctors to migrate their illegible handwriting and paper charts into the electronic medical records that policymakers and politicians have for years been saying could revolutionize medical care (and the amount of money it costs us). That windfall, now fueling a booming health IT industry, was intended to address another goal outlined in the stimulus bill: Every American should have an electronic health record by 2014. The promise is enormous. Patients could take control of copies of their own personal health histories. ... Read More
Taking Liberties Back From the Patriot Act
May 17, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
America has a long — and at times embarrassing — history of curbing civil liberties in times of perceived peril. There were the Alien and Sedition Acts of the late 1700s, authorizing the deportation of immigrants and restricting the free speech of government critics during wartime. Later, there came the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, the investigation of citizens suspected of sympathizing with communism during the Cold War and the surveillance of antiwar activists during the Vietnam era. "In each of these cases," said Julian Sanchez, a researcher at the ... Read More
The Government Internet ID Proposal’s Pros and Cons
April 19, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Last Friday, the U.S. government unveiled its National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace, a blueprint for the private-industry development of voluntary tools that would authenticate and consolidate your identity online. We need such a thing, the government says — in a pamphlet titled, well, "Why We Need It" — because our proliferating online passwords are inconvenient and insecure, and because last year 8.1 million adults in the U.S. suffered identity theft or fraud, at a cost of $37 billion. The idea seems like one mandated by the moment. Increasingly, important commerce, ... Read More
The Politics of a European Pat-Down
January 5, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
The level of panic this winter over the snow — of all things — that snarled European and American travel plans obscured another story about invasive pat-downs at European airports. Briefly, it goes like this: Travelers in Europe didn't have to suffer them. That should seem strange. Washington has used visa-free travel agreements to foist other security restrictions on its European allies, from electronic passports to body scanners. But so far there have been almost no American-style complaints in Europe about "enhanced pat-downs," even at major European hubs like Schiphol, Frankfurt ... Read More
Google Street View Ruffles European Feathers
April 14, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Recent controversies over the volume of information about ordinary Europeans that U.S. agencies have demanded in the wake of 9/11 — including banking details, flight-customer data and passport biometrics — show a strange difference between America and the Old World. Americans make noise about small government and individual freedom, but they tend to be more willing to give up private data than your average European. Why? One reason is that Europeans have darker memories of "big government" from the last century than Americans do, just as they have a closer relationship to major wars. In ... Read More
The ePassport Revolution
March 17, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
One detail from the assassination last month of a Hamas leader in Dubai should, at first glance, ease the minds of privacy experts. None of the hit team — widely suspected to be Israeli Mossad agents traveling under stolen identities — used newfangled biometric passports. The 11 members of the team traveling with falsified European identities, used old-fashioned, unchipped passports, according to Interpol. Biometric passports were one of the most powerful and unobtrusive changes to international travel that the United States insisted on after Sept. 11, 2001. As a direct result of U.S. ... Read More
