Slashdot Mirror
Connecticut Governor Seeks to Protect Personal Data Online
Technical Writing Geek alerts us to a report that Connecticut governor Jodi Rell has begun to develop legislation to create an "opt-out" registry to prevent the distribution of personal information on the internet. The registry would be analogous to the "Do Not Call" list. This comes after Rell received many complaints about the availability of personal data from directory assistance sites such as WhitePages and 411.com. While Rell understands that the "sites are breaking no law by gathering and disseminating this information," the legislation will add to the work she has done to re-evaluate the disposition of private data. Where do we draw the line between free speech and privacy in the information age? From the Journal Inquirer:
"'Privacy concerns are constantly evolving,' Rell said. 'We must not only keep up with them but do our best to stay ahead of the curve.' Rell said she will ask state agencies to review private information about residents that the state collects, manages, and distributes."
Since "now law is broken" by companies for publishing out private information, we can plead the same by publishing the company's members information online.
Every single stockholder, boardmember, CEO, lawyer, employee contact information (including public and private numbers and addresses) should be published online 411.com by us.
Once the mighty CEOs and CFOs see their private and unlisted numbers plus email IDs online, am sure the congress and senate would go overnight to enact a law preventing that from happening.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
I wish just once that one of these politicians would have the balls to make it opt-in, with written consent required and none of that "hidden deep within a contract" crud. Perhaps requiring a public notary to stamp it too might be beneficial.
I know for sure that I'd sleep well if these opt-out lowlifes lost their jobs.
Once that opt-out list is complete, how much do you think spammers and scammers will pay for it? Oh, wait -- you're going to give access to anyone running a directory or investigative website? What could possibly go wrong?
At the bottom of the
generally, if you own the press you can print what you want,~~
with a few caveats, however, and as these are well established there is no need for discussion
1. you should not publish slander
2. you should not infringe other folk's copyrights
3. you should not involve in a conspiracy to commit crime
Is my personal information copyright protected? I see no reason why it shouldn't be and in a day and age where we have more hackers than Hollywood had stage robbers there are good reasons why we should protect everyone's personal data by law.
...she'd stop the laptops with state taxpayer financial data from being plucked from employee cars. (They claim they need all the data resident on every laptop whose operator is working on a given datatset.) Here in CT that's the bigger issue for her and the lege, To this more recent one, I can recall people being horrified years ago that we could find their phone listing in whitepages, their address on mapquest and an aerial photo on terraserver. Of course all of this was public information, now it's just easier for the "datarazzi" to get it in bulk. We've been on the DNC list and reg'd with DMA's pref service for years, and they still get thru. National opt-in with some teeth in it would be nice.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
In Sweden we have laws against publishing personal information of citizens. To publish even the equivalent of the social security number you must have the consent of the citizen in question. Unfortunately within license agreements the paragraph covering consent of publishing of personal information is buried deep within the text.
When I worked at the CT Department of Education, I lobbyed desperately for a centralized, secure data repository for student data. The analysts would constantly send student lists on disks via snail(or by a "secure" zip file), print paper lists of student data and take them offsite, and even put copies of this data on their personal computers to take home. I was passionate about keeping the demographic data of Connecticuts students secure and grew frustrated with the roadblocks.
We even got a Federal Grant with Governor Rell's help to contract out the project (we in no way had the resources to build it). As far as I can tell, the data are still in a SQL 2005 database, replicated multiple times, with access given to multiple undocumented users.
No business rules are in place other than the 1 overworked DBA there granting "read only" to anyone who requests it. There is a team there working very hard to make the data secure, but they are small and unsupported. Perhaps Madam Rell's efforts would be better directed at her own IT infrastructure...
--Always, I mean never..., No I mean always check your references.--