(Via ZDNet) Tom Espiner writes

The British Computer Society has called for Phorm’s controversial targeted-advertising system to be opt-in.
…
“If you are making use of personal information, you should be asking to do so, and it’s good practice to offer opt-in,” said Evans. “If you are looking to build trust amongst customers, this is the way to do it.”
…
Evans suggested that, at a recent “town-hall meeting” organised by Phorm, the company seemed to be pushing back against suggestions that its service should be opt-in.

Via ZDNet Tom Espiner writes

The British Computing Society has criticised the government, claiming its high-profile data breaches have eroded public trust.

On Tuesday the BCS published the results of a survey of members of the public. Of the 1,025 respondents, 66 percent said their trust in government departments had decreased due to information breaches such as the loss of 25 million personal records by HM Revenue & Customs last year.

…”People inside the public sector know [it] is not terribly surprising that [breaches such as HMRC's] happened, but for people outside the public sector this was a huge shock.”

Via The Register

“We could do a sample manual recount, but if it turned up a problem, we wouldn’t be able to do anything about it, which would be the quickest way to collapse voter confidence in the result,” Bennet told us.

This is an anathema to campaigners like Mercuri. “The law should always include some percentage of manual audit and there always must be a way that a problem with the check should trigger an investigation, possibly resulting in the discarding of the electronic totals.”

And she is not the only one who thinks the electronic count should be audited. Becky Hogge, executive director of the Open Rights Group, says that ORG is campaigning for the law to be changed to make a manual recount of a statistically significant sample to be mandatory in all electronically counted elections.

via The Register

The amount of criticism lobbed onto to e-voting machine makers for sub-par security prompted Wagner to liken them to Microsoft before it made security a major push. “Voting system vendors are where Microsoft was 10 years ago,” he said.

(via OUT-LAW.COM)

The Lords passed an amendment to the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill, defeating the Government. It still needs to be approved by MPs in the House of Commons

The amendment would make it a criminal offence to “intentionally or recklessly disclose information contained in personal data to another person, repeatedly and negligently allow information to be contained in personal data to be disclosed, or intentionally or recklessly fail to comply with [their] duties”.

(Via Techdirt.)

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However, a New Jersey state judge has now ruled that it’s perfectly reasonable for independent inspectors to review the machines.

via OUT-LAW

The European Parliament has said that copyright-infringing music and film file-sharing should not be criminalised. The Parliament has said that file-sharers should not be prosecuted as criminal offenders unless they seek to profit from the sharing.

(Via ZDNet) Tom Espiner interviews The Earl of Erroll, member of the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee

… Data breaches are going to occur. Which is why I think that we need to not keep all our eggs in one basket. This is where I really do agree with the Information Commissioner that we need to limit the amount of data that is being kept by any one about us. Because if its not there it can not be taken or it can not be miss used, so why are we keeping a whole lot of stuff we don’t use. We always think that we can mine it later to catch the bad guys, actually I think more good guys get hurt than you ever catch bad guys in many of these cases. …

(Via ZDNet) Matt Loney writes

It will take another data scandal before tougher sentences are imposed for data misuse, according to the information commissioner.

“I called on the government some time ago to increase the penalty to a prison sentence. The government did listen and agreed to increase the penalty to a prison sentence in the Criminal Justice [and Immigration] Bill, but a last-minute, very intensive lobbying campaign… meant it got watered down. The result is that the prison sentence remains but will not be implemented straight away, which means we will need another scandal before it is implemented.”

(Via The Guardian) Richard Wray writes

The BBC should not be forced to help pay for the creation of next-generation superfast broadband networks the Ofcom chief executive, Ed Richards, told MPs today.

…

He said it was more sensible for the investment burden to be shouldered by network operators and consumers, with prices likely to rise for faster connections.

He said he would not rule out “content-led tariff models” - where ISPs do deals with content providers so their services run more smoothly over their networks.

Asked whether Ofcom has the power to levy the BBC for so-called next-generation access networks Richards said, “I am very sure we don’t have that power … and I’m pretty disinclined to go down that route”.