#data laws and regulation

[vibin-in-the-void]

oh shit tumblr live has come to the uk oh fuck oh shit oh bloody fucking shit

[kaurwreck]

If you're following KOSA, you should also be following state legislation, which is much more rapidly adopting tech regulation related to child safety than Congress. For reference, in 2023, 13 states adopted 23 laws related to child safety online.

Even if your locality hasn't adopted similar tech regulation, online platforms, apps, and websites are rarely operating in only some states. When regulations become patchwork, it's often easier for companies to adopt policies reflective of the most stringent regulations relevant to their service for all users, rather than try to implement different policies for users based on each user's location.

I know this because that's what happened when patchwork data privacy regulations began swelling — which is why many webites have privacy policies reflective of the GDPR that apply even to users outside of Europe. I also know this because I'm a tech lawyer — I'm the wet cat drafting policies for and advising tech and video game companies on how to navigate messy, convoluted, and patchwork US regulatory obligations.

So, when I say this is how companies are thinking about this, I mean this is how my coworkers and I have to think about this. And because the US is such a large market, this could impact users outside the US, too.

[donuttrymedebil]

Perhaps this is the bipartisan issue we have been looking for? People of all backgrounds giving the finger to AI fetishists and tech bros?

[quotesfrommyreading]

The researchers' scraper was used to determine whether a consent form met GDPR and eDirective requirements. The rules say consent must be explicit. So, for example, users must click a button rather than just hop straight through to the website; all aspects of consent must be equally easy to reject as to accept; and pre-ticked boxes are not allowed. 

Of the 10,000 websites scraped that used a CMP form, the researchers found that implicit consent is present on a third of websites. 

The researchers also found that CMPs make rejecting all tracking – which includes cookies and other techniques like browser and device fingerprinting that Firefox-maker Mozilla is trying to block by default – "substantially more difficult than accepting it". 

Microsoft and Apple are also trying to tackle third-party tracking in their respective Edge and Safari browsers. 

Just over half of websites in the survey don't even offer a 'reject all' button and only 12.6% of sites have a 'reject all' button that is just as easy to access as the 'accept all' button, for example, by placing both options on the same page.  

"Furthermore, when users went to amend specific consent settings rather than accept everything, they are often faced with pre-ticked boxes of the type specifically forbidden by the GDPR," the researchers wrote. 

On top of all this, the researchers – and users too – have no idea whether toggling on or off a specific category of tracking actually produces the intended result for the user. The median number of third-party trackers that data is shared with on sites is a whopping 315 vendors.   

The end result of hiding the 'reject all' option is that people overwhelmingly choose to 'accept all'. 

"The results of our empirical survey of CMPs today illustrates the extent to which illegal practices prevail, with vendors of CMPs turning a blind eye to – or worse, incentivizing – clearly illegal configurations of their systems," the researchers conclude.

  —  Cookie consent: Most websites break law by making it hard to 'reject all' tracking

[beenheresinceforever]

A lot of stuff hits differentlycnow - it's like crazy science fiction

for anyone too young to know this: watching The Truman Show is a vastly different experience now, compared to how it was before youtube and social media influencers became normal

before it was like, "what a horrifying thing to do to a human being! to take away their autonomy and privacy, all for the sake of profits! to create fake scenarios for them to react to, just to retain viewership! to ruin their happiness just so some corporate entity could harvest money from their very humanity! how could anyone do something so evil?"

and now it's like, "ah, yeah. this is still deeply fucked up, but it's pretty much what every influencer has been doing to their kids for a decade now. probably bad that we've normalized this experience"

[agiledock]

Understanding Data Protection and Cybersecurity Compliance in India

Get a detailed analysis of India's cybersecurity laws on AgileDock. From understanding data protection laws to compliance with cybercrime regulations, this resource offers invaluable insights for staying abreast of legal frameworks in tech.

[why-animals-do-the-thing]

average United States contains 1000s of pet tigers in backyards" factoid actualy [sic] just statistical error. average person has 0 tigers on property. Activist Georg, who lives the U.S. Capitol & makes up over 10,000 each day, has purposefully been spreading disinformation adn [sic] should not have been counted

I have a big mad today, folks. It's a really frustrating one, because years worth of work has been validated... but the reason for that fucking sucks.

For almost a decade, I've been trying to fact-check the claim that there "are 10,000 to 20,000 pet tigers/big cats in backyards in the United States." I talked to zoo, sanctuary, and private cat people; I looked at legislation, regulation, attack/death/escape incident rates; I read everything I could get my hands on. None of it made sense. None of it lined up. I couldn't find data supporting anything like the population of pet cats being alleged to exist. Some of you might remember the series I published on those findings from 2018 or so under the hashtag #CrouchingTigerHiddenData. I've continued to work on it in the six years since, including publishing a peer reviewed study that counted all the non-pet big cats in the US (because even though they're regulated, apparently nobody bothered to keep track of those either).

I spent years of my life obsessing over that statistic because it was being used to push for new federal legislation that, while well intentioned, contained language that would, and has, created real problems for ethical facilities that have big cats. I wrote a comprehensive - 35 page! - analysis of the issues with the then-current version of the Big Cat Public Safety Act in 2020. When the bill was first introduced to Congress in 2013, a lot of groups promoted it by fear mongering: there's so many pet tigers! they could be hidden around every corner! they could escape and attack you! they could come out of nowhere and eat your children!! Tiger King exposed the masses to the idea of "thousands of abused backyard big cats": as a result the messaging around the bill shifted to being welfare-focused, and the law passed in 2022.

The Big Cat Public Safety Act created a registry, and anyone who owned a private cat and wanted to keep it had to join. If they did, they could keep the animal until it passed, as long as they followed certain strictures (no getting more, no public contact, etc). Don’t register and get caught? Cat is seized and major punishment for you. Registering is therefore highly incentivized. That registry closed in June of 2023, and you can now get that registration data via a Freedom of Information Act request.

Guess how many pet big cats were registered in the whole country?

97.

Not tens of thousands. Not thousands. Not even triple digits. 97.

And that isn't even the right number! Ten USDA licensed facilities registered erroneously. That accounts for 55 of 97 animals. Which leaves us with 42 pet big cats, of all species, in the entire country.

Now, I know that not everyone may have registered. There's probably someone living deep in the woods somewhere with their illegal pet cougar, and there's been at least one random person in Texas arrested for trying to sell a cub since the law passed. But - and here's the big thing - even if there are ten times as many hidden cats than people who registered them - that's nowhere near ten thousand animals. Obviously, I had some questions.

Guess what? Turns out, this is because it was never real. That huge number never had data behind it, wasn't likely to be accurate, and the advocacy groups using that statistic to fearmonger and drive their agenda knew it... and didn't see a problem with that.

Allow me to introduce you to an article published last week.

This article is good. (Full disclose, I'm quoted in it). It's comprehensive and fairly written, and they did their due diligence reporting and fact-checking the piece. They talked to a lot of people on all sides of the story.

But thing that really gets me?

Multiple representatives from major advocacy organizations who worked on the Big Cat Publix Safety Act told the reporter that they knew the statistics they were quoting weren't real. And that they don't care. The end justifies the means, the good guys won over the bad guys, that's just how lobbying works after all. They're so blase about it, it makes my stomach hurt. Let me pull some excerpts from the quotes.

"Whatever the true number, nearly everyone in the debate acknowledges a disparity between the actual census and the figures cited by lawmakers. “The 20,000 number is not real,” said Bill Nimmo, founder of Tigers in America. (...) For his part, Nimmo at Tigers in America sees the exaggerated figure as part of the political process. Prior to the passage of the bill, he said, businesses that exhibited and bred big cats juiced the numbers, too. (...) “I’m not justifying the hyperbolic 20,000,” Nimmo said. “In the world of comparing hyperbole, the good guys won this one.”

"Michelle Sinnott, director and counsel for captive animal law enforcement at the PETA Foundation, emphasized that the law accomplished what it was set out to do. (...) Specific numbers are not what really matter, she said: “Whether there’s one big cat in a private home or whether there’s 10,000 big cats in a private home, the underlying problem of industry is still there.”"

I have no problem with a law ending the private ownership of big cats, and with ending cub petting practices. What I do have a problem with is that these organizations purposefully spread disinformation for years in order to push for it. By their own admission, they repeatedly and intentionally promoted false statistics within Congress. For a decade.

No wonder it never made sense. No wonder no matter where I looked, I couldn't figure out how any of these groups got those numbers, why there was never any data to back any of the claims up, why everything I learned seemed to actively contradict it. It was never real. These people decided the truth didn't matter. They knew they had no proof, couldn't verify their shocking numbers... and they decided that was fine, if it achieved the end they wanted.

So members of the public - probably like you, reading this - and legislators who care about big cats and want to see legislation exist to protect them? They got played, got fed false information through a TV show designed to tug at heartstrings, and it got a law through Congress that's causing real problems for ethical captive big cat management. The 20,000 pet cat number was too sexy - too much of a crisis - for anyone to want to look past it and check that the language of the law wouldn't mess things up up for good zoos and sanctuaries. Whoops! At least the "bad guys" lost, right? (The problems are covered somewhat in the article linked, and I'll go into more details in a future post. You can also read my analysis from 2020, linked up top.)

Now, I know. Something something something facts don't matter this much in our post-truth era, stop caring so much, that's just how politics work, etc. I’m sorry, but no. Absolutely not.

Laws that will impact the welfare of living animals must be crafted carefully, thoughtfully, and precisely in order to ensure they achieve their goals without accidental negative impacts. We have a duty of care to ensure that. And in this case, the law also impacts reservoir populations for critically endangered species! We can't get those back if we mess them up. So maybe, just maybe, if legislators hadn't been so focused on all those alleged pet cats, the bill could have been written narrowly and precisely.

But the minutiae of regulatory impacts aren't sexy, and tiger abuse and TV shows about terrible people are. We all got misled, and now we're here, and the animals in good facilities are already paying for it.

I don't have a conclusion. I'm just mad. The public deserves to know the truth about animal legislation they're voting for, and I hope we all call on our legislators in the future to be far more critical of the data they get fed.

[panaromicinoftechs]

Mastering Mobile App Localization: The Ultimate Guide

[michellesanches]

“Reject All” cookie consent update

On 9 August 2023, the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) and the UK Competition & Markets Authority (CMA) jointly published a position paper on harmful design practices in digital markets, particularly focusing on cookie consent banners. The paper clarifies the ICO’s stance on the “Reject All” button in these banners. Key points from the paper include: Equal Ease for Consent Choices:…

[grrajeshkumar]

Ultimate Guide: Legal Compliance for E-commerce in India [2024]

To start and run an e-commerce store in India, you need to comply with various rules, laws, and regulations. Here’s a categorized overview of the major ones: Business Registration and Licensing: Obtain a valid business registration (e.g., Sole Proprietorship, Partnership, Private Limited Company, or One-Person Company) Apply for relevant trade licenses from the concerned state/local…

[azharniaz]

New cars are now 'the worst' products when it comes to protecting consumer data

Nico De Pasquale Photography | Moment | Getty Images So-called connected cars, vehicles equipped with internet access, are becoming the norm, and their proliferation is sounding the alarm for consumer data privacy advocates. By 2030, more than 95% of the passenger cars sold are likely to have embedded connectivity, according to Counterpoint Technology Market Research. This allows car…

[neosciencehub]

Neuralink's Human Trials: Regulatory Hurdles of Neurotechnology

Neuralink's Human Trials: Regulatory Hurdles of Neurotechnology @neosciencehub #neosciencehub #science #neuralink #humantrails #neurotechnology #elonmusk #FDA #healthcare #medicalscience #ClinicalResearch #health #AITech #BrainComputer #DataPrivacy #NSH

The journey of Neuralink, Elon Musk’s ambitious neurotechnology venture, to its first human trials represents a significant achievement in the field of biomedical innovation. However, this path was not without its challenges. Neo Science Hub’s Scientific Advisory Team examines the intricate regulatory landscape that companies like Neuralink must navigate, highlighting the complex interplay of…

[redgoldsparks]

I am not excited about Harris as a candidate, but I will be voting for her in this upcoming election. This is why→

(full transcript under the cut)

I AM VOTING AGAINST THIS

“Transgender ideology” to be classified as pornography & excluded from First Amendment protection. Authors who produce & distribute it threatened with prison. Educators & public librarians who share it classed as registered sex offenders. communications & technology firms that facilitate its spread shuttered. -Project 2025, page 5

Delete the terms sexual orientation, gender identity, diversity, equity, & inclusion, gender equality, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, out of every federal rule, contract, grant, regulation, & piece of legislation that exist. -Project 2025 page 5

I AM VOTING AGAINST THIS

Victimization should not be a basis for an immigration benefit. -Project 2025, page 141

Increase all fees for asylum applications, limit the availability of fee waivers. -Project 2025, page 146

Mandatory appropriation for border wall system infrastructure. -Project 2025, page 147

Deny loan access to those who are not U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents & deny loan access to students at schools that provide in-state tuition to illegal aliens. -Project 2025, page 167

Ensure that only U.S. citizens & lawful permanent residents utilize or occupy federally subsidized housing. -Project 2025, page 167

I AM VOTING AGAINST THIS

Encourage intelligence agencies not to waste effort collecting surveillance data when they can buy it from private sector facial recognition companies. -Project 2025, page 206

Defund the Corporation for Public Broadcast, specifically NPR & PBS educational programs like Sesame Street. -Project 2025, pages 246-247

The USDA will not be able to place environmental issues ahead of agricultural production. Reconsider the Food Stamps program. -Project 2025, page 290

Labeling regulations that unnecessarily delay the manufacture & sale of baby formula should be re-evaluated. -Project 2025, page 302

I AM VOTING AGAINST THIS

Eliminate the Community Eligibility Program which allows school districts with high rates of poverty to offer meals to all students without having to qualify each student individually. No longer provide meals to students during the summer unless students are taking summer-school classes. -Project 2025, page 303

No public education employee shall use a pronoun in addressing a student that is different from that student’s biological sex without written permission of the parents or guardians. -Project 2025 page 346

Delete reporting on which educational institutions claim religious exemption from Title IX. -Project 2025 page 357

I AM VOTING AGAINST THIS

Gut the Office for Civil Rights’ power to prosecute any kind of discrimination in public schools. -Project 2025, page 357

Eliminate the Office of Fossil Energy & Carbon Management -Project 2025 page 377

Eliminate the stand-alone Office of Environmental Justice & External Civil Rights -Project 2025, page 421

Restructure the Office of International & Tribal Affairs into the American Indian Environmental Office -Project 2025, page 421

Eliminate the Office of Public Engagement & Environmental Education -Project 2025, page 421

Pause all action of the Environmental Protection Agency for review. -Project 2025, page 422

I AM VOTING AGAINST THIS

Center for Disease Control stripped of the ability to suggest that schools embrace masking or vaccination strategies. -Project 2025, page 454

All states will be required to submit detailed information about pregnancies, abortions & miscarriages to a federal database. -Project 2025, page 455

The medication Mifepristone, a life-saving drug used to stop deadly postpartum hemorrhages that’s also used in chemical abortions, will be banned. -Project 2025, pages 458-459

Artificial intelligence should be used to determine what is suitable treatment for those currently covered by Medicare. -Project 2025, page 463

I AM VOTING AGAINST THIS

Repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, which implements government price controls for prescription drugs. -Project 2025, page 465

Funding for abortion travel prohibited under the Hyde Amendment. -Project 2025, page 471

End taxpayer funding of Planned Parenthood. -Project 2025, page 471

Withdraw Medicaid funds for states that require abortion insurance. -Project 2025, page 472

Hospitals will no longer be willing to perform emergency abortions, even to save the life of the mother. -Project 2025, page 473

I AM VOTING AGAINST THIS

Rescind the Department of Health & Human Services' ability to impose a moratorium on rental evictions during COVID. -Project 2025, page 492

Rescind large portions of The Endangered Species Act & The Migratory Bird Treaty Act, reinstate Trump’s plan for opening the National Petroleum Reserve of Alaska to leasing and development. -Project 2025, page 524

Review & downsize national monuments. -Project 2025, page 532

End the Endangered Species Act’s ability to prevent economic development & de-list many currently endangered species. -Project 2025, pages 533-534

I AM VOTING AGAINST THIS

Make it harder for workers to unionize & easier for employers to retaliate against whistleblowers & organizers. -Project 2025, pages 601-602

TikTok classified as a national security concern & made non-operational. -Project 2025, page 674

Break up National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration, including National Weather Service & National Marine Fisheries Service. -Project 2025, page 674

Downsize the Office of Oceanic & Atmospheric Research; disband its climate-change research work. -Project 2025 page 676

AND SO MUCH MORE. 

The full text of Project 2025 is available at static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf I am very grateful to stopproject2025comic.org which produced a series of very readable comics to help explain many sections of Project 2025. Some of the language in this post is taken directly from their transcripts. (You can read many of their comics here on tumblr @stopproject2025comic) Please vote against Project 2025. Our tattered democracy, healthcare, clean air & water, workers rights, reproductive rights, civil rights, intellectual freedom and more are at stake. 

[iotavenews]

[kellylor]

Ok, so, here's a lot of thoughts about queer identity have been rattling around in my head for the past..18 months or so.

My big work project last year involved, among other things, helping design a form for collecting demographic information from the public, to be submitted to my employer, a US government agency. We want to collect race, ethnicity, gender identity, and sexual orientation information in order to be able to look for patterns of discrimination in certain financial transactions. There's a lot of poorly-designed government forms out there, and part of my role in the project was making sure the layout and instructions for the form were clear. There was a whole working group that made recommendations for language and format on the gender and sexual orientation questions, and the label we ended up with for sexual orientation was "LGBTQIA+". Which is fine, I guess, and very government form-y. It mostly did fine in the usability testing that I ran (though a distinct subgroup of older participants who spoke English as a second language didn't know what it meant until I listed out the words).

But while we were working on the layout of the form, I had a whole series of conversations with the other designer on the project about the impossibility of truly representing someone's identity as a series of discrete checkboxes on a form. Especially because things like racial and ethnic groups are fucking conceptual messes made up based on bad ideas, there are no truly good ways to neatly capture that as data. The sex and gender identity situation is less, uh, fully fictional, but still complex and messy precisely because they ARE rooted in real biology and real lived experience. Because biology actually dgaf about anyone's neat conceptual boxes, bodies will still exist the way they exist and people are gonna feel and behave the way they feel and behave, with a huge range of variation and exceptions to rules.

You have to just pick something as flexible as you can make it, try to be as consistent as possible about it, and know the limitations inherent in the data. For our purposes it's mostly not a big problem to not capture a full, nuanced picture of a specific individual, because the goal of the data is to be able to identify broad statistical trends. And ultimately what we want to learn from the form is "are you at risk of discrimination based on your identity?" and try to give people options that they recognize well enough to self-report. But also, because it is government data, there is a lot of pressure to be granular, to offer extremely precise subcategories. And sometimes that can be a really important goal, because we've seen things like the way lumping "Asian-American and Pacific Islander" into one category fails to show how, for example, people of Indian descent in the US have significantly different experiences than Cambodians or Pacific Islanders. But it's also impossible to do in a truly accurate way that will give everyone good options for self-identification. There are just so many niche experiences and only so much room on a printed page. Also so many unanswerable questions like, Are Brazilians Hispanic? Fuck if I know! The way racists treat people from Latin America is both shitty and ideologically incoherent, I don't know how to put that on a form.

So there's always a lot of tension between the weird messy reality that exists, and the urge to turn it all into clean, oversimplified categorical boxes. And LGBTQIA+, and any other variation of the alphabet soup, always strikes me as a term fundamentally starting from a position of atomized categorical boxes, straining under the weight of reality. The first time I ever heard an "official" term, suitable for use on something like a government form, that was not just "gay", it was "LGBT", and I encountered it in the context of trying to raise the profile of trans people, because just sticking them under the umbrella of "gay" sure elides a lot of differences between cis and trans experiences. But then you know, there keep being more specific identities that get pointed out, and that have to be added, because like, you have to put everyone in the right little subgroup in order to decide whether they count or not. I mean, the number of times I have seen the notes on a post talking about some iteration of LGBTQetc as an umbrella term turn into arguments about what some of the specific letters mean is...the same as the number of posts I've read talking about the terms. People who are ostensibly on the same side of trying to support a community, however you want to label it, still cannot get over arguing about the damn label. Because the alphabet soup is at its core a disaggregated approach masquerading as a flexible umbrella term, and you can't get way from that tension!

Queer, though. Queer is deliberately not trying to sublabel everyone. You don't need to fit into anyone else's defined boxes. Again, there is a time and place for understanding and discussing the differences in experiences among different people, but for me, in terms of community, the place I want to start from is building solidarity. And we all have an extremely important thing in common: we are the enemies of heteronormativity. The people most invested in perpetuating heteronormativity fully regard us all as their enemies, regardless of whichever slot they've decided to put us into! I have questioned a lot, over the years, as an ace woman who has only ever dated men, whether I get to "count" as queer, but that has bothered me less over time as a) I have come to understand queer identity as being as much about political solidarity as about my personal characteristics and b) I have learned that asking "am I queer enough to count?" is an extremely queer-ass experience. For myself at least, asking, "Does my experience conform to heteronormative expectations?" Is much easier to answer (definitely not, to extent I have experienced ace-related backlash or oppression in my own life it's all originated in de-legitimizing queer sex broadly, or in pressure to make conventional romantic life choices), and much more clarifying than reading a bunch of arguments about whether the A in LGBTQIA stands for "ally" or "asexual".

So, that's why I have tried to be more definite in thinking of myself as queer, and why I specifically prefer "queer" as a label. And also why trans rights absolutely do not threaten my rights as a cis woman, celebrating kinky sex is not acephobic, and kink belongs at pride.

[thelawandmore]

Recent Developments in Data Privacy and Their Implications for Business 

Recent Developments in Data Privacy and Their Implications for Business

Data privacy is a hot topic in today’s digital world. Here are nine recent developments that changed the data privacy landscape and what they mean for businesses and consumers.  1. The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into force in May 2018, creating a unified data protection framework across the EU and giving individuals more control over their personal data. The EU General…