Tag: US

On the heels of the announcement of the newly kicked off EU-US Free Trade Agreement (TAFTA), also known as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), Access joined a group of roughly 35 internet freedom organizations, public health groups, activists, and other public interest leaders to urge both the US and the EU to keep copyright, patents, trademarks and geographical indications — so-called “intellectual property” — out of the negotiations.

The recent introduction of Do-Not-Track legislation is again bringing the issue of online privacy back to the forefront in the United States. Given its mixed history, lack of widespread agreement on how to treat Do-Not-Track requests, and what sort of behavior constitutes tracking, the effectiveness of existing Do-Not-Track systems are far from adequate.

As the European Parliament debates new data protection reforms,US technology companies have arrived in Brussels to commence an unprecedented lobbying effort aimed at preventing strong regulation and weakening existing standards. Most troublingly, some of the draft legislative proposals have been copied and pasted directly from lobbying documents, evidence of the immense influence of US giants like Google and Amazon on European policy.

Today, Access filed a Freedom of Information Act request before the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Department of Justice to ask which governments are requesting user information through mutual legal assistance treaties. This filing comes two days after a blogger and lawyer Rodrigo Ferrari was formally charged by Chilean prosecutors, who obtained his Twitter information through such a process, which was seemingly executed improperly.

CISPA, the ill-conceived piece of US legislation on information sharing and cybersecurity, is back. Yesterday, the Intelligence Committee of the US House of Representatives held a hearing on cybersecurity, under the banner of “Advanced Threats Facing Our Nation.” The committee, chaired by Republican congressman Mike Rogers, heard testimony from representatives of the financial, energy, corporate, and security industries. No representative of the civil liberties or privacy community was invited to testify.

The order sets out provisions for sharing critical threat information from government to the private sector, but potentially establishes a foundation for later bidirectional sharing of sensitive information. Its vague categorization of what constitutes critical infrastructure limits transparency on threat reduction, and may hinder confidence building measures intended to mitigate cyber conflict. It offers some civil liberties protections, but doesn’t go far enough.

In the rapidly-changing mobile landscape in the U.S., users often lack information about the new technology running their apps, games, devices, and accompanying privacy policies. On Friday, the Federal Trade Commission stepped in with guidelines to the mobile marketplace to better protect the privacy of mobile users.

From 2004, the United States has signed onto free trade agreements with nearly half of the countries in Latin America. As a product of these agreements, Peru, Colombia, Chile, Panama and other Central American countries agreed to enact new and more restrictive copyright laws, which can place important threats on the fundamental rights of internet users across the region.

Today is Data Privacy Day, an international holiday that marks the 32nd anniversary of the signing of the Council of Europe’s Data Protection Convention 108. Data Privacy Day, which is celebrated all over Europe, Canada, and the US, recognises our fundamental right under human rights law and the importance of privacy to the maintenance of democratic societies, the advancement of human dignity, and the flourishing of other rights such as freedom of expression and association.