Privacy Lives joins 13 privacy and consumer groups (including EPIC, Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, and World Privacy Forum) in urging Google to add a prominent link to its privacy policy on its home page. In a letter (pdf) to CEO Eric Schmidt, the groups said: 

California law requires the operator of a commercial web site to “conspicuously post its privacy policy on its Web site.” The straightforward reading of that law is that Google must place the word “privacy” on the Google.com web page linked to its privacy policy. Moreover, just about every major company that operates a web site places a link to its privacy policy on its homepage. Read more »

Disclosure: I have worked on various projects with Nicole Ozer and the ACLU of Northern California.

ACLU of Northern California’s Technology and Civil Liberties Policy Director Nicole Ozer writes about the Twitter scandal on her blog, Bytes and Pieces. Quick recap of the scandal: Twitter is a “micro-blogging” site where people send one- or two-line updates to their friends. One user alleged harassment by another user; Twitter was asked to ban the offender. The requester cited Twitter’s Terms of Service. Twitter instead chose to review its Terms of Service, setting off a debate about free speech on the Internet and what responsibilities such services have to their users. Go to Bytes and Pieces for more detail and analysis.

The D.C. Council’s Committee on Public Safety and the Judiciary yesterday held a hearing, which I testified at, on the “Video Interoperability for Public Safety” (“VIPS”) program. There is little known about the VIPS program. On April 8, in a press release, Mayor Fenty announced the creation of the Video Interoperability for Public Safety Program, which would “connect the city’s more than 5200 cameras into one network” and “result[] in a CCTV system that operates 24 hours a day, 365 days a year [...].” Mayor Fenty stated that VIPS would not focus solely on crime, instead “the VIPS program will also have an all-hazards approach” and be consolidated under the District’s Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency (“HSEMA”). It is unclear what “all-hazards” encompasses.

The other witnesses were: Jeffrey Rosen, George Washington University Law Professor and author of “The Naked Crowd,” a book about privacy after the September 11, 2001 attacks; Steve Block, Legislative Counsel of the ACLU of the National Capital Area; Sharon Bradford Franklin, Senior Counsel of the Constitution Project; Marc Rotenberg, Executive Director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center; and Dan Tangherlini, D.C. City Administrator (Tangherlini was pinch-hitting for Darrell Darnell, Director of D.C.’s homeland security agency, who was unable to make the hearing because of a personal issue). Read more »

Two weeks ago, the Bank of New York Mellon Corp. admitted that two couriers hired by the company lost several unencrypted data tapes in the last few months -– a box of tapes was lost in February and a single data tape was lost in April. “Combined, the two data breaches exposed sensitive information of more than 4.5 million people and 747 companies,” ComputerWorld reports.

The data on the tapes included names, Social Security numbers, images of scanned checks, and more. The Connecticut Consumer Protection Commissioner has launched an investigation, as state law requires banks to immediately notify customers when such data is lost. Almost 500,000 Connecticut residents are at risk of identity theft because of the data loss. Read more »

MSNBC has a good report on the hidden costs of customer loyalty cards for supermarkets and other stores. This links to a video that will automatically load.