Privacy

Human Rights and the Digital Domain Primer - Part 3

The digital domain encompasses the different spaces and spheres we use to relate and interact with the people and things that surround us using digital technologies. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, UDHR, as the globally accepted standard, should serve us as the guiding light when it comes to striking the delicate balance between our rights and responsibilities on and off-line. more

Human Rights and the Digital Domain Primer - Part 2

The digital domain encompasses the different spaces and spheres we use to relate and interact with the people and things that surround us using digital technologies. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, UDHR, as the globally accepted standard, should serve us as the guiding light when it comes to striking the delicate balance between our rights and responsibilities on and offline. more

Human Rights and the Digital Domain Primer - Part 1

The digital domain encompasses the different spaces and spheres we use to relate and interact with the people and things that surround us using digital technologies. The digital domain is not limited to the technologies itself, but it has an important ethical dimension that encompasses the values, principles and instruments that inform and govern it. Created by humans for humans, our beliefs, cultural backgrounds, and biases are reflected in the codes we write and the algorithms we create. more

EU Lawmakers Call for Further Talks to Strengthen Proposed US Data Transfer Pact

EU lawmakers are pushing for additional negotiations to strengthen a proposed data transfer agreement between the European Union (EU) and the United States. They argue that the current agreement still has shortcomings that must be addressed. The potential delay in reaching an accord is concerning for the thousands of companies that rely on the agreement. more

Supreme Court Declines to Hear Wikimedia Foundation’s Challenge to NSA Surveillance

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to hear the Wikimedia Foundation's appeal of a lower court's decision to dismiss their lawsuit against the National Security Agency (NSA).  more

European Union Wants to Fix the GDPR

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was adopted in 2016 and has since become the global standard for privacy regulation. The GDPR has been a watershed moment in tech regulation, requiring companies to ask for consent to collect data online and threatening hefty fines if they don't comply. more

U.N. Cybercrime Convention Enters Critical Stage

Negotiations for a U.N. cybercrime convention have reached a critical stage at the fourth round of discussions in Vienna. Delegates from over 150 states have met for over 100 hours to discuss the proposed convention, which has been met with skepticism from some states, nongovernmental organizations, and other stakeholders more

Going Dark: How the Increasingly Dark Network Is Creating Some Pretty Ugly Choices for Site Security Administrators

I'd like to reflect on a presentation by Dr. Paul Vixie at the October 2022 meeting of the North American Network Operators Group (NANOG) on the topic of the shift to pervasive encryption of application transactions on the Internet today. There is a view out there that any useful public communications medium needs to safeguard the privacy and integrity of the communications that it carries.  more

Cyberhygiene Requires Critical Thinking

At his farewell speech in August outgoing, Telstra CEO Andy Penn mentioned that the cyber threat has never been as serious as the present. He mentioned the deteriorating geopolitical situation and the big shift in how criminals operate in the cyber domain. One thing is for sure is that in order to enjoy all the positives resulting from the digital economy, we need to be far more vigilant about the barrage of information that we are receiving and/or have access to. more

WHOIS Disclosure Questions

In 2020, the ICANN Generic Name Supporting Organization (GNSO) Council approved a plan to revamp the WHOIS system as per the recommendations given by the ICANN Expedited Policy Development Process (EPDP). This plan directed ICANN to develop a centralized System for Standardized Access/Disclosure (SSAD) for WHOIS records. After much debate regarding the suitability and cost of such a system, ICANN brought together a group... more

CENTR Publishes Comment on the European Commission’s DNS Abuse Study

CENTR, which represents European national top-level domain name registries (ccTLDs) such as .si or .eu, has published its comments on the European Commission's DNS abuse study, calling out some of the "misleading analysis and unfortunate conclusions in the study." more

What Is Privacy?

Ask ten people what privacy is, and you'll likely get twelve different answers. The reason for the disparity is that your feelings about privacy depend on context and your experience. Privacy is not a purely technical issue but a human one. Long before computers existed, people cared about and debated privacy. Future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis defined it as "the right to be left alone" in 1890. Before the Web became a ubiquitous phenomenon, people primarily thought of privacy in terms of government intrusion. more