Cory Doctorow On Privacy and Oversharing 53
slash-sa writes with a link to an opinion piece from Cory Doctorow that begins: "The European Parliament is currently involved in a wrangle over the new General Data Protection Regulation. At stake are the future rules for online privacy, data mining, big data, governmental spying (by proxy), to name a few. Hundreds of amendments and proposals are on the table, including some that speak of relaxing the rules on sharing data that has been "anonymised" (had identifying information removed) or "pseudonymised" (had identifiers replaced with pseudonyms). This is, however, a very difficult business, with researchers showing how relatively simple techniques can be used to re-identify the data in large anonymised data sets, by picking out the elements of each record that make them unique."
Civil and criminal penalties against cyberbullying (Score:2, Interesting)
I think a good first step would be to make life tougher for cyberbullies who post images and documents with the clear intention of destroying someone's reputation or making them the subject of ridicule. Whether such incidents would be sanctioned would depend on how public the documents were, whether the victim was a celebrity or public person (e.g. high-ranking government or corporate official), whether the victim knowingly participated in either the photographing or the posting of the images/documents, etc. The laws would have to be clearly defined.
Re:Cory's site (boingboing) has 7 tracking cookies (Score:2, Interesting)
Just like other "globally-renowned" pontificaters, Doctorow is of course a publicity whore who has grown addicted to the lime-light.
European Parliament (Score:5, Interesting)
It is worth noting that this topic is among the "codecision" matters for which the EU parliament has a word to say. But even in that case it is still long away from being a real parliament. The European Commission proposed the initial draft, and it can strip the amendment voted by the parliament (it already happened). Moreover the parliament will have to agree with the European council, which is made of member states' government representative, and acts as a upper house in the EU framework.