Jenn Webb
Jenn Webb is a veteran of the newspaper industry turned freelance scribe, editor and researcher. She is a nerd with a passion for publishing, technology and cultural disruption.
Strata Week: EU’s proposed data reforms spark “unprecedented” US lobbying
Controversy surrounds EU's data reforms, an investigation into "data-ism," and geeks fighting for our civil liberties.
EU’s data protection reforms could “instigate a trade war”
Ars Technica’s Cyrus Farivar took a look this week at the European Commission’s proposed reform to existing data protection laws. Farivar highlights some of the major changes the proposed reform would bring:
“The data protection reforms as proposed by the Commission would consolidate existing data protection rules, would require data breach notification within 24 hours, and would include a ‘right to be forgotten,’ allowing citizens to ‘delete their data if there are no legitimate grounds for retaining it.’”
The reform would facilitate data portability as well, Farivar notes, making it easier to transfer personal data from LinkedIn to Facebook, for instance, and could impose fines from 1% to 4% of global revenues for companies held in violation of the EU rules.
The proposed reform has ignited quite a controversy. Farivar looks at a draft response (PDF) to the proposed reform legislation published in January by Jan Philip Albrecht, a Green Party member of the European Parliament, that has “ruffled some feathers,” further expanding data protection rights beyond what the EU Commission proposed. Farivar also looks at the role members from the Pirate Party are playing in the debate, and the response from U.S. officials.
Farivar reports that U.S. Foreign Service economic officer John Rodgers noted in a speech in Berlin (Google Translate) “that a vast right to delete such personal information was not technically feasible and would pose a huge problem for all globally minded companies” and he “warned that the data protection reform as currently conceived could ‘instigate a trade war.’”
“[L]obbying pressure from American government representatives and their corporate allies is intensifying at an unprecedented level,” Farivar reports. Joe McNamee, executive director of European Digital Rights, told Farivar that “[n]othing, not even ACTA, caused the U.S. to lobby on this scale in Brussels.” You can read Farivar’s full report at Ars Technica.
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Visualization of the Week: Profits vs Super Bowl ad expense
The team at Quartz compares 3.5 hours of advertiser profits to the nearly $4 million Super Bowl ad price tag. Were the ads worth it?
Commercials have long been a highlight of the Super Bowl (if you missed any, the Verge grabbed the Hulu compilation), but how much do the advertising companies profit from the notoriously expensive ad spots?
Ritchie King at Quartz pulled together a chart to provide context. King reports that ads this year sold for an average of $3.7 to $3.8 million, but as King explains and the chart shows, that dollar figure is a mere “pittance” for the advertising companies. “In fact,” King notes, “some of them make almost as much in profits in an average 3.5 hours — roughly the time it takes to air the Super Bowl itself.”
Click here for more on the visualization
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Strata Week: Raising the world’s data privacy IQ
Celebrating Data Privacy Day, how data fits into Bill Gates' education plan, and why "long data" deserves our attention.
Data Privacy Day and the fight against “digital feudalism”
Data Privacy Day was celebrated this week. Led by the National Cyber Security Alliance, the day is meant to increase awareness of personal data protection and “to empower people to protect their privacy and control their digital footprint and escalate the protection of privacy and data as everyone’s priority,” according to the website.
Many companies used the day as an opportunity to issue transparency reports, re-informing users and customers about how their data is used and and how it’s protected. Google added a new section to its transparency report, a Q&A on how the company handles personal user data requests from government agencies and courts.
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Visualization of the Week: Identify your insiders, outsiders, connectors and gateways
WolframAlpha's updated Facebook tool visualizes your network (and makes outliers obvious).
WolframAlpha announced an upgrade to its Personal Analytics for Facebook platform that allows users to visualize a number of aspects of their Facebook ecosystem. John Burnham outlines the updates on the WolframAlpha blog, noting that the popular visualization from the tool’s first release has a number of enhancements that allow users to better visualize how their social network fits together.
Click here for more on the visualizations
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Strata Week: What to do with Obama’s election tech — open source vs mothballs
The battle to open source OFA code; a student hacker uncovers security flaw, gets expelled; and ethics and taxes for user data collection.
A cloudy future for Obama’s election code
A battle is brewing between politicians and the dream team of programmers that helped Obama win the nerdiest election ever. Ben Popper reports at The Verge that the programmers who worked on the Obama for America (OFA) 2012 campaign want to open source the code behind the campaign’s website, its donation collection and email systems, and its mobile app. Yet “[t]hree months after the election, the data and software is still tightly controlled by the president and his campaign staff, with the fate of the code still largely undecided,” Popper writes.
OFA’s director of front-engineering Daniel Ryan told Popper that he believes the Democratic National Committee (DNC) will “mothball” the tech and argues that it should be open because it was built on top of open source code and, therefore, should go back to the public. Popper also notes that if the DNC keeps the code on ice until the 2016 election, it will be useless. “But if our work was open and people were forking it and improving it all the time,” Ryan told Popper, “then it keeps up with changes as we go.” Ryan also points out that not opening up the code not only would stifle development for the next election, but would also hinder opportunities for other progressive organizations to build on the code in the next four years.
Popper reports that a DNC official responded to a request for comment, stating that “OFA is still working out the future of their tech and data infrastructure so any speculation at this time is premature and uninformed.” You can read Popper’s in-depth report at The Verge.
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Visualization of the Week: Pollution exposure by city
Using WHO data, The Guardian Data Blog team pulled together a world map of annual pollution exposure.
The latest reports of severe smog blanketing Beijing inspired The Guardian Data Blog team to dip into World Heath Organization data and design a world map of annual pollution exposure by city. Data Blog researcher Ami Sedghi writes:
“The World Health Organisation (WHO) warns that exposure to particulate matter increases the risk of many chronic and acute respiratory conditions in children and adults. The WHO air quality guidelines indicate that by reducing particulate matter (PM10) pollution from 70 to 20 micrograms per cubic metre, air quality related deaths can be reduced by around 15%.”
Click here for the full interactive map.
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Strata Week: Political data mining “bait-and-switch”
Inaugural 2013 app has plans for your data, the "unprecedented" security issues of the Internet of Things, and optical switches speed up data centers.
Here are a few stories from the data space that caught my attention this week.
Inaugural 2013 app takes as much as it gives
The Presidential Inaugural Committee (PIC) launched the first official inaugural smartphone app, Inaugural 2013 (for iOS and for Android), Monday. Daniel Strauss reports in a post at The Hill that inauguration attendees can use the app to locate and RSVP to events, watch events via livestream, and navigate the event with an interactive map.
What isn’t front and center in the pomp and circumstance of the shiny new app are the terms of service and the privacy statement. Steve Friess at Politico points out that in the fine print, users are giving the PIC permission to share their data — phone numbers, email, home addresses, and GPS location data, for instance — “with candidates, organizations, groups or causes that [the PIC] believe have similar political viewpoints, principles or objectives.”
Gregory Ferenstein reports at TechCrunch that “privacy advocates find it troubling that the fine-print on the PIC’s website says it can use activity data ‘without limitation in advertising, fundraising and other communications in support of PIC and the principles of the Democratic party, without any right of compensation or attribution.’”
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