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Government Surveillance, Privacy & Data

This Week In Data Collection News, And The Privacy Paradox

NPR:

No information is private online — the phrase is hardly news to anybody who actively uses the Web for work, play and in between. Here’s a CNN headline dating back to 2013 that minces no words: “Online privacy is dead.”

That particular CNN article focused on the revelations about the scope of Web data available to the federal government. The ensuing pushback still ripples out as privacy advocates and many tech companies try to rein in government access to what Americans say and do online.

This week the American Civil Liberties Union and others marked a big victory when California Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law the most stringent digital privacy protections in the country, raising the hurdle for law enforcement and other officials who want to access private digital data.

“The concerns that individuals have raised, and rightly so, are not necessarily about the companies, even big companies that collect a lot of data, but about when their data ends in the places they didn’t anticipate, and particularly in the hands of the government,” says Nuala O’Connor, president and CEO of the Center for Democracy & Technology.

“Only your government can deprive you of life or liberty,” she says.

Full article here.