The House Committee on Education and the Workforce gave approval last week to a bill that would undermine the privacy protections guaranteed by the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA). The bill would condition health insurance discounts for wellness programs on whether an employee agrees to participate in genetic testing. Under GINA, employers may not penalize employees for keeping their genetic data private. DNA profiles and other genetic records contain particularly sensitive personal information that can impact employment decisions, insurance availability, and even criminal justice outcomes. EPIC supported GINA and has backed the right of individuals to control the use of their genetic data in numerous comments and cases.
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Senator Markey and Representative Welch today introduced the Drone Aircraft Privacy and Transparency Act of 2017. The Act would establish privacy safeguards to protect individuals from drone surveillance. The Drone Privacy Act requires publicly available data collection statements from operators and warrants for drone surveillance by law enforcement. “Drones flying overhead could collect very sensitive and personally identifiable information about millions of Americans, but right now, we don’t have sufficient safeguards in place to protect our privacy,” said Senator Markey. The Act includes privacy protections EPIC has proposed in statements to Congress and comments to federal agencies. In EPIC v. FAA, EPIC is challenging the failure of the FAA to protect the public from aerial surveillance.
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Federal prosecutors charged two Russian intelligence agents with orchestrating a 2014 hack that compromised 500 million Yahoo accounts in a brazen campaign to access the e-mails of thousands of journalists, government officials, and technology company employees.
In a 38-page indictment unsealed Wednesday, the prosecutors said Dmitry Aleksandrovich Dokuchaev, 33, and Igor Anatolyevich Sushchin, 43—both officers of the Russian Federal Security Service—worked with two other men—Alexsey Alexseyevich Belan, 29, and Karim Baratov, 22—who were also indicted. The men gained initial access to Yahoo in early 2014 and began their reconnaissance, the indictment alleged. By November or December, Belan used the file transfer protocol to download part or all of a Yahoo database that contained user names, recovery e-mail accounts, and phone numbers. The user database (UDB) also contained the cryptographic nonces needed to generate the account-authentication browser cookies for more than 500 million accounts.
The International Working Group on Data Protection in Telecommunications adopted new recommendations to improve the privacy and security of biometric identification online. The Berlin-based Working Group includes Data Protection Authorities and experts who work together to address emerging privacy challenges. The “Working Paper on Biometrics in Online Authentication )” explains that “biometrics in online authentication offers one possibility to address some of the shortcomings” of conventional online passwords, but the “data protection and privacy risks” must be considered. Among their recommendations, the experts urge policymakers to support for “[p]roactive privacy tools,” and contend biometric authentication should “remai[n] an active choice by the user and not a condition of use.” EPIC will host the 61st meeting of the International Working Group in Washington DC in April 2017.
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AUSTIN, Texas—At the first day of the SXSW Interactive festival, George “Geohot” Hotz announced an updated business plan for his company Comma.ai, all while revealing a new piece of hardware that will be given away, as opposed to sold: the Panda.
The small circuit-board device comes with an ODB2 connector on one end and a USB port on the other. Hotz described the ODB2 as compatible with any car made after 1996, though ideal for cars made later than 2006. The device’s crowded circuit board also includes a 32-bit processor, a Wi-Fi driver, and a 4A charger, which he described as “an awesome phone charger.” Hotz said the Panda can expose more active car data than the ODB2 plug-in devices used by apps such as Torque, including individual wheel speeds, steering wheel angles, and blinker functions. The ODB2 even has the ability to issue accelerator and brake commands to a car.
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Categories : FIP 3: One use, IoT, Privacy, Terms of Service
In a 53-14 vote that took place days ago, South Dakota’s legislative House passed legislation that makes arrest booking photos public records. The measure, which cleared the state’s Senate in January, will be signed by Governor Dennis Daugaard.
With that signature on Senate Bill 25, (PDF) South Dakota becomes the 49th state requiring mug shots to be public records. The only other state in the union where they’re not public records is Louisiana.
The South Dakota measure is certain to provide fresh material for the online mug shot business racket. These questionable sites post mug shots, often in a bid to embarrass people in hopes of getting them to pay hundreds of dollars to have their photos removed. The exposé I did on this for Wired found that some mug shot site operators had a symbiotic relationship with reputation management firms that charge for mug shot removals.
In the latest skirmish over privacy in the cellphone age, a federal judge in Chicago has rejected a law enforcement request to force potential targets in an ongoing investigation to provide fingerprints to unlock any iPhones or other Apple devices.
The order by U.S. Magistrate Judge David Weisman concerned a request for a warrant to search a residence where investigators believed someone was using the internet to traffic images of child pornography, court records show.
The latest revelations about the U.S. government’s powerful hacking tools potentially takes surveillance right into the homes and hip pockets of billions of users worldwide, showing how a remarkable variety of everyday devices can be turned to spy on their owners.
Televisions, smartphones and even anti-virus software are all vulnerable to CIA hacking, according to the WikiLeaks documents released Tuesday. The capabilities described include recording the sounds, images and the private text messages of users, even when they resort to encrypted apps to communicate.
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