The Center for Democracy & Technology this week launched a “Take Back Your Privacy” campaign to support the creation of more user-friendly privacy tools and push for the passage of a federal consumer privacy law. “It’s time for privacy law and online practices to catch up with the seismic shifts in technology,” CDT President and CEO Leslie Harris said in a statement Thursday. “We know that Americans want better privacy protections. Take Back Your Privacy will help them make sure that their voices a

SAN FRANCISCO, December 2, 2009 – The phenomenal growth of online social networks is finally moving the decades-long debate over the nature of privacy in the digital world forward, said legal experts at an annual conference on innovation in San Francisco on Tuesday.

Congress has threatened to enact and revamp consumer privacy laws for decades, but the complexity of the task has generally stumped the body, except for the areas of finance and health.

The French Constitutional Court on Thursday approved legislation that would create a graduated-response program to copyright infringement. The goal is to enable copyright owners to halt illegal peer-to-peer file-sharing without suing individual consumers.
Thomas Sydnor, Senior Fellow at The Progress & Freedom Foundation hailed the move, calling it a step forward for common sense and the rule of law on the Internet. “In America today, if a caregiver for my children used one of my home computers for illegal file-sharing, copyright owners would have to file a federal lawsuit and spend thousands of dollars—which they would then have to recover from me—just to alert me to the problem,” Sydnor added.

The chairmen of the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission on Friday jointly encouraged the public to take safeguards to protect themselves, their privacy, and their personal information online.

ARLINGTON, Va., September 26, 2009 – Location-based software has become one of the hottest new web applications, fueled by the expansion of smart phone users, these applications allow users to share their location with their friends or search for businesses based on the user’s location.

WASHINGTON, September 9, 2009 – The second panel at the Federal Communications Commission’s “consumer context” panel on September 9 focused on the tools and techniques that will enable consumers to utilize new broadband-friendly applications.

WASHINGTON, July 25, 2009 – Advertisers need to consider consumers’ right to privacy when they collect information on individual internet consumers, a panel of academics, non-profits and industry officials agreed on Friday.

WASHINGTON, June 3, 2009 – Officials from Google and Microsoft denied that they were creating privacy-invading user profiles of internet users, speaking at the 2009 Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference at George Washington University here.

WASHINGTON, June 2, 2009 – Just 133 days into the Obama administration, technology policy and broadband deployment are issues “at the heart of this administration’s plans for the future,” special assistant to the president for science, technology and innovation policy Susan Crawford said Tuesday during opening remarks at the Computers, Freedom, Privacy conference in Washington.

WASHINGTON, April 23, 2009 – Congressional scrutiny of consumer privacy on broadband networks, especially uses of so-called “deep packet inspection” technology, ramped up Thursday as industry representatives and consumer advocates testified before the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet.