EU’s Revamped Privacy Rules May Save Companies $3 Billion a Year

Bodoni, Stephanie. "EU’s Revamped Privacy Rules May Save Companies $3 Billion a Year." BusinessWeek, September 25, 2012.

From the article:  "Companies could save as much as 2.3 billion euros ($3 billion) in administrative costs thanks to an overhaul of the European Union’s data-protection rules, the EU’s justice chief said.

The proposed changes to the EU’s 17-year-old data protection rules will allow companies to do business in Europe based on “just one law” and the savings they could make “is not peanuts,” EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding said in prepared remarks for a speech in Dublin, Ireland, today. Companies will save a further 130 million euros every year by not having to notify authorities “each and every time data is processed.”  Read more

Researcher Says Twitter Holds the Potential to Alter Public Health Policy

Goldman, Lisa. "Researcher Says Twitter Holds the Potential to Alter Public Health Policy." Personal Democracy Media, September 19, 2012.

From the report: "Mark Dredze, an assistant research professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University, wrote a research paper called How Social Media Will Change Public Health, in which he discusses how he has used an algorithm to mine tweets for information about self medication, exercise, dental pain and smoking to augment and create new public health capabilities. " Read more

See also

Dredze, Mark. "How Social Media Will Change Public Health," IEEE Intelligent Systems, Volume 27, Number 4, p. 81-84, July-August, 2012.

 

Google News at 10: How the Algorithm Won Over the News Industry

Garber, Megan. "Google News at 10: How the Algorithm Won Over the News Industry." The Atlantic, September 20, 2012.

From the blog:  "Achieving all this through an algorithm is, of course, approximately one thousand percent more complicated than it sounds. For one thing, there's the tricky balance of temporality and authority. How do you deal, for example, with a piece of news analysis that is incredibly authoritative about a particular story without being, in the algorithmic sense, "fresh"? How do you balance personal relevance with universal? How do you determine what counts as a "news site" in the first place? How do you account for irony and cheekiness in a headline? How do you accommodate news coverage's increasing emphasis on the update as its own form of news narrative? Andre Rohe, Google News's head of engineering, summed up the challenge: "How do I take a story that has 20,000 articles, potentially, and showcase all of its variety and breadth to the user?"" Read more

Freedom of the Net 2012: A Global Assessment of Internet and Digital Media

Kelly, Sanja, Sarah Cook and Mai Truong. "Freedom of the Net 2012: A Global Assessment of Internet and Digital Media." Freedom House, September 24, 2012.

 From the report: "This year’s findings indicate that restrictions on internet freedom in many countries have continued to grow, though the methods of control are slowly evolving and becoming less visible. Of the 47 countries examined, 20 have experienced a negative trajectory since January 2011, with Bahrain, Pakistan, and Ethiopia registering the greatest declines." Read more

Automated Prediction: Perception, Law, and Policy

Zarsky, Tal. "Automated Prediction: Perception, Law, and Policy (September 1, 2012). Communications of the ACM, Volume 55, Number 9, September 2012, p. 33-35.

From the abstract:  "Governments are now using automated prediction for a wide range of tasks, from insider trading detection to fighting and preventing violent crimes and terrorist attacks. Automated predictions are considered problematic and even frightening by a large segment of the public. This common visceral response is not always rational and accurate, yet it is backed by several relevant legal concepts. However, automated prediction deserves a closer look, given the fact that it limits the role of human discretion, and thus of hidden biases. Therefore, automated predictions might promote important social objectives, such as equality and fairness.

This short "Viewpoint" addresses the disparity between data mining's hidden benefits, and its negative perception in public opinion. It concludes that automated prediction should have a more significant role in modern government. Therefore, legal impediments blocking some of these practices should be rethought and perhaps removed." Read more

Ad Industry, Privacy Advocates Spar Over 'Do Not Track'

Gruenwald, Juliana. "Ad Industry, Privacy Advocates Spar Over 'Do Not Track'." National Journal, September 21, 2012.

From the article:  "Lawmakers and the Federal Trade Commission are being lobbied to intervene to help settle differences between some advertising industry representatives and privacy advocates over how to implement a “do-not-track” option giving consumers the choice of whether they want to be tracked online. …The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an international organization that sets technical standards for the Web, has been convening talks involving advertising and tech industry representatives and privacy advocates on developing a standard for what it means to abide by a consumer’s do-not-track preference. Those talks, which have been going on for months, however, appear to have reached a stalemate and some of the parties involved are now looking outside the group for help." Read more