Tag Archives: technology

Colorado introduces tight consumer protection law on data privacy

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From today’s Digital Journal:

Colorado is set to become the third state — alongside Virginia and California — to sign a privacy act into law, marking another step towards consumer data protection in the U.S.

The new law will be known as ‘The Colorado Privacy Act (CPA)’ and it is scheduled go into effect July 2023. The proposal is for the Act to be applicable to companies that either collect personal data from 100,000 Colorado residents or collect data from 25,000 Colorado residents and also derive some portion of revenue from sales.

The Act will affect businesses and they will need to prepare and put in place systems to ensure compliance. In addition, the Act will provide new rights for customers, and there remains the potential for more states to get on board with this form of legislation.

Looking at the changes for Digital Journal is Tyrone Jeffrees, Vice President of Engineering & US Information Security Officer at Mobiquity.

Jeffrees looks at the growing array of privacy bills appearing in the U.S.: “The news of Colorado joining Virginia and California in the passage of privacy acts is welcome as the nation moves towards ensuring these rights for residents and consumers. The law, while holding many similarities to Virginia’s privacy regulations, is expected to be more effective than others as it can be enforced by both the Colorado office of the Attorney General as well as local district attorney offices.”

He adds that the CPA is a little different to the earlier bills: “The CPA goes beyond California’s by requiring a blocking option for consumers to “opt-out” of having their personal information shared to create consumer profiles.”

This means new challenges for businesses, says Jeffrees. He recommends: “To ensure compliance with the CPA’s heavier guidelines, businesses and organizations must have a deeper understanding of how their data is collected and exactly what it is being used for when targeting new customers and sharing publicly.”

Jeffrees sees the legislation as something positive, noting: “I’m thrilled for the residents of Colorado. Ultimately, each new legislation is a win for U.S. consumers and privacy advocates. As more states introduce privacy regulation, U.S. consumers will be afforded increased agency and control over how their data can be collected and used.”

He see the U.S. as moving towards stronger consumer rights: “Right now, we have a patchwork of privacy regulations that guarantee rights for some, but not all, U.S. consumers based on residency. Each state that adopts common privacy principles will slowly start to raise the bar, but it would be ideal for U.S. residents to have one single framework for data privacy that serves all Americans.”

Read the complete article here.

To Protect Consumer Data, Don’t Do Everything on the Cloud

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From today’s Harvard Business Review:

When collecting consumer data, there is almost always a risk to consumer privacy. Sensitive information could be leaked unintentionally or breached by bad actors. For example, the Equifax data breach of 2017 compromised the personal information of 143 million U.S. consumers. Smaller breaches, which you may or may not hear about, happen all the time. As companies collect more data — and rely more heavily on its insights — the potential for data to be compromised will likely only grow.

With the appropriate data architecture and processes, however, these risks can be substantially mitigated by ensuring that private data is touched at as few points as possible. Specifically, companies should consider the potential of what is known as edge computing. Under this paradigm, computations are performed not in the cloud, but on devices that are on the edge of the network, close to where the data are generated. For example, the computations that make Apple’s Face ID work happen right on your iPhone. As researchers who study privacy in the context of business, computer science, and statistics, we think this approach is sensible — and should be used more — because edge computing minimizes the transmission and retention of sensitive information to the cloud, lowering the risk that it could land in the wrong hands.

But how does this tech actually work, and how can companies who don’t have Apple-sized resources deploy it?

Consider a hypothetical wine store that wants to capture the faces of consumers sampling a new wine to measure how they like it. The store’s owners are picking between two competing video technologies: The first system captures hours of video, sends the data to third-party servers, saves the content to a database, processes the footage using facial analysis algorithms, and reports the insight that 80% of consumers looked happy upon tasting the new wine. The second system runs facial analysis algorithms on the camera itself, does not store or transmit any video footage, and reports the same 80% aggregated insight to the wine retailer.

The second system uses edge computing to restrict the number of points at which private data are touched by humans, servers, databases, or interfaces. Therefore, it reduces the chances of a data breach or future unauthorized use. It only gathers sufficient data to make a business decision: Should the wine retailer invest in advertising the new wine?

As companies work to protect their customers’ privacy, they will face similar situations as the one above. And in many cases, there will be an edge computing solution. Here’s what they need to know.

Read the complete article here.

Biden administration blocks Trump-era rule affecting gig workers’ employment

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From today’s Reuters News Service:

The Biden administration on Wednesday blocked a Trump-era rule that would have made it easier to classify gig workers who work for companies like Uber and Lyft as independent contractors instead of employees, signaling a potential policy shift toward greater worker protections.

Shares of companies that employ gig labor such as Uber, Lyft and DoorDash immediately pared gains. At 2.15 p.m. ET (1815 GMT) Uber shares traded down 3.2%, Lyft was down 5.8% and DoorDash fell 5%.

“By withdrawing the independent contractor rule, we will help preserve essential worker rights and stop the erosion of worker protections that would have occurred had the rule gone into effect,” Labor Secretary Marty Walsh said in a statement.

“Too often, workers lose important wage and related protections when employers misclassify them as independent contractors,” he said.

Walsh told Reuters in an interview last week that a lot of U.S. gig workers should be classified as “employees” who deserve work benefits. His comments hurt stocks of companies that employ gig labor.

Walsh said in the interview that his department would have conversations in coming months with companies that employ gig labor to make sure workers have access to consistent wages, sick time, healthcare and “all of the things that an average employee in America can access.”

An Uber spokesman acknowledged on Wednesday the current employment system is outdated.

“It forces a binary choice upon workers: to either be an employee with more benefits but less flexibility, or an independent contractor with more flexibility but limited protections.”

Read the complete article here.

New Privacy Bills Aim to Protect Health Data During the Pandemic

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From today’s Consumer Reports Online:

Tech companies are developing new contact-tracing apps, sharing people’s location information with health researchers, and taking other steps to put consumer data to work in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic. Now, lawmakers are writing laws to ensure the increased surveillance doesn’t also end up hurting consumers.

Over the past two weeks, legislators in the House and Senate proposed competing privacy bills that would establish safeguards.

The bills differ in some big ways, but both include rules mandating transparency and consent, and controlling the use of data for purposes other than public health. The first, the COVID-19 Consumer Data Protection Act, was introduced by Senate Republicans last week. Democrats introduced a counterproposal today, the Public Health Emergency Privacy Act. 

Tech companies are taking a variety of approaches to collecting and sharing consumer data in the wake of the pandemic.

A Facebook survey conducted by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University is tracking symptoms to look for new hot spots around the country. Ancestry and 23andMe are using their collections of DNA data to search for genetic clues that might predict how severely a patient will react to a coronavirus infection. Apple and Google joined forces to build a contact tracing technology that uses Bluetooth signals from cell phones to identify and notify people who have been exposed to someone infected with the coronavirus. And businesses from location data brokers to smart thermometer companies are repurposing other kinds of data for public health research.

Public health experts have mixed opinions on whether the efforts will provide useful tools for containing the pandemic. But even tools that do help can also introduce serious privacy concerns.

“It’s all very well intentioned, but there is a huge risk here that there could be some really pernicious discrimination, especially when you think about how this virus is disproportionately affecting African Americans, Hispanics, older Americans, and other marginalized communities,” says David Brody, counsel and senior fellow for privacy and technology at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, an advocacy group that endorsed the Democrats’ Public Health Emergency Privacy Act.

Read the compete article here.

Op-Ed: Is the Coronavirus Shaping the Future of How We Work?

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From today’s New York Times:

Both the irony and the symbolism were evident as members of the California Future of Work Commission gathered in a virtual meeting, hastily rescheduled in the midst of an unfolding crisis.

The pandemic, and the recession all but certain to follow, threaten to pre-empt and overwhelm efforts to shape the future of work, and thus the future of California — how to create good jobs, reduce poverty and redefine relationships and structures to narrow the enormous income inequality that overshadows the state’s wealth and success.

Thus the recent meeting became not only an experiment for doing business in a post-coronavirus world but also a conversation laden with doubts, fears and aspirations about how the future may evolve.

The coronavirus will have a silver lining if it serves as the impetus for constructive upheaval, in the way that the sudden forced reliance on telecommunication is already having an impact.

“We are conducting a natural experiment,” said Peter Schwartz, a futurist and member of the commission. “One we would prefer not to have conducted. But we’re going to learn the hard way, rather quickly and by necessity, everything that can be done remotely. … We’re not going back to zero afterward. What do we learn out of all this in terms of how our society can change?”

World War II, the last international crisis that upended life in California, transformed the state into a military center and ushered in decades of growth that reshaped the Golden State. There is already a sense that in a different way, the coronavirus may create an inflection point of comparable significance. For better or worse, whenever the epidemic subsides, there will be no going back.

Read the complete article here.

Pandemic Erodes Gig Economy Work

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From today’s New York Times:

It was just after 11 a.m. last Wednesday when Jaime Maldonado, 51, pulled his rented Nissan into a lot outside San Francisco International Airport. He figured he had a long wait ahead — about two hours — before Lyft would ping him to pick up a passenger.

Occasionally, jets roared overhead — but not many, which meant not enough passengers for Mr. Maldonado, who said that before the coronavirus outbreak, he spent just 20 to 40 minutes waiting outside the airport for customers. To kill time, he got out of his car, looping the mask he recently started wearing around his wrist, and went to talk to other drivers.

As the minutes ticked by, Mr. Maldonado wondered out loud, “What am I going to do to pump gas and feed my kids tomorrow?” His number of rides in a typical week had dropped to around 50 from 100 earlier in the month, he said, and his payout had plunged by half to about $600 a week, from which Lyft would subtract the rental fee for his car.

The coronavirus pandemic is exposing the fragile situations of gig economy workers — the Uber and Lyft drivers, food-delivery couriers and TaskRabbit furniture builders who are behind the convenience-as-a-service apps that are now part of everyday life. Classified as freelancers and not full-time employees, these workers have few protections like guaranteed wages, sick pay and health care, which are benefits that are critical in a crisis.

While gig economy companies like Uber and DoorDash have promoted themselves as providing flexible work that can be lifelines to workers during economic downturns, interviews with 20 ride-hailing drivers and food delivery couriers in Europe and the United States over the past week showed that the services have been anything but that.

Instead, as the fallout from the coronavirus spreads, gig workers’ earnings have plummeted and many have become disgruntled about their lack of health care. Many others are also feeling economic pain from the outbreak — layoffs have hit workers in retailing, airlines, hotels, restaurants and gyms — but even as public health agencies have recommended social isolation to insulate people from the virus, gig workers must continue interacting with others to pay their bills.

Read the complete article here.

In major ruling, San Diego judge says Instacart will flunk AB 5 contractor test

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From today’s San Diego Union-Tribune:

A San Diego Superior Court judge has ruled that Instacart is likely misclassifying some of its workers as contractors — when the law requires they be classified as employees — marking a notable step toward enforcement of the controversial new state law known as AB 5.

But the ruling came with a healthy dose of skepticism from the judge over the “wisdom” of the law itself.

Judge Timothy Taylor issued an injunction Feb. 18 against Instacart in San Diego Superior Court, essentially warning the San Francisco company that it’s failing to comply with the state’s labor laws. Instacart disagrees with the ruling, and plans to file an appeal, the company said in a statement Tuesday.

Instacart, which operates nationally and has a presence in San Diego, is an app that allows customers to place grocery orders online, which are then purchased and delivered by gig workers called “shoppers.” The labor law case, filed by San Diego City Attorney Mara Elliott in September, takes issue with how the grocery delivery company classifies its shoppers.

The suit alleges that Instacart shoppers do not qualify as independent contractors under a 2018 California Supreme Court decision (Dynamex Operations West, Inc. v. Superior Court). It’s the Dynamex case that spurred Assembly Bill 5 to move its way through the state legislature last year, sponsored by Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez (D-San Diego), and signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom. The law went into effect Jan. 1.

According to Judge Taylor, the law makes it clear that Instacart is in violation, calling California state policy “unapologetically pro-employee.”

“While there is room for debate on the wisdom of this policy, and while other states have chosen another course, it is noteworthy that all three branches of California have now spoken on this issue,” Taylor wrote in a court filing dated Feb. 18. “The Supreme Court announced Dynamex two years ago. The decision gave rise to a long debate in the legal press and in the Legislature. The Legislature passed AB 5 last fall. The Governor signed it. To put it in the vernacular, the handwriting is on the wall.”

Read the complete article here.

The Great Google Revolt

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From today’s New York Times:

Laurence Berland had just gotten out of the subway in New York, some 3,000 miles from his desk in San Francisco, when he learned that Google had fired him. It was the Monday before Thanksgiving, and the news came to him, bad-breakup-style, via email. “Following a thorough investigation, the company has found that you committed several acts in violation of Google’s policies,” the note said. It did not elaborate on what he had done to violate these policies.

Berland, an engineer who had spent more than a decade at the company, had reason to expect he might be fired. He had been suspended a few weeks earlier after subscribing to the open calendars of several senior Google employees, whom he suspected of meeting with outside consultants to suppress organizing activity at the company. During a subsequent meeting at which he was questioned by Google investigators, he had the feeling that they were pressuring him to say something that could be grounds for termination. Then, the Friday before he was fired, he had spoken at a well-publicized rally of his co-workers outside Google’s San Francisco offices, accusing the company of silencing dissent.

Even so, the timing and manner of his dismissal surprised him. “I thought they’d do it when all the media attention died down,” he said. “When the suspensions and the rally were no longer on people’s minds.” Instead, at a moment when the spotlight was shining brightly, Google had escalated — as if to make a point.

Berland was one of at least four employees Google fired that day. All four were locked in an ongoing conflict with the company, as they and other activists had stepped forward to denounce both its treatment of workers and its relationship with certain customers, like U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Berland’s terminated colleagues were even more shocked by the turn of events than he was. Rebecca Rivers, a software engineer based in Boulder, Colo., was dismissed over the phone after accessing internal documents. Rivers had only recently come out as transgender and was pursuing a medical transition. “I came out at Google expecting to stay at Google through the entire transition,” she said. “It’s terrifying to think about going to a job interview, because I’m so scared of how other companies treat trans employees.”

Sophie Waldman and Paul Duke, the two other Googlers fired that day, had not received so much as a warning, much less a suspension. Though they had been questioned by corporate security two months earlier about whether they had circulated documents referring to Customs and Border Protection contracts, they had been allowed to continue their work without incident. Waldman, a software developer in Cambridge, Mass., said she was given a 15-minute notice before she was summoned to the meeting where she was fired; Duke, an engineer in New York, said an invitation appeared on his calendar precisely one minute beforehand. Security officials escorted him out of the building without letting him return to his desk. “I had to describe to them what my jacket, scarf and bag looked like,” he said.

Read the complete article here.

Kickstarter Employees Vote to Unionize in a Big Step for Tech Workers

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From today’s New York Times:

Employees at the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter voted on Tuesday to unionize, the first well-known technology company to take the step toward being represented by organized labor.

The decision, which was formalized by a vote count at the National Labor Relations Board, came down to a narrow margin, with 46 employees voting in favor of the move and 37 opposing it. The debate over a union — and whether such representation was appropriate for highly paid tech workers — had been a source of tension at the company for many months.

“I’m overjoyed by this result,” said Dannel Jurado, a Kickstarter senior software engineer who voted for a union. “There’s a long road ahead of us, but it’s a first step to the sustainable future in tech that I and so many others want to see.”

The pro-union vote is significant for the technology industry, where workers have become increasingly activist in recent years over issues as varied as sexual harassment and climate change. Behemoth companies such as Google and Amazon have struggled to get a handle on their employees, who have staged walkouts and demanded that their companies not work with government entities and others.

But large-scale unionization efforts have faltered. Only a group of contractors at a Google office in Pittsburgh unionized last year, and a small group of Instacart workers managed to do so this month. In the past, most unionization drives have been associated with blue-collar workers and lower-paid white-collar workers rather than white-collar tech workers, who are often paid upward of $150,000 a year.

Veena Dubal, an associate professor of employment law at the University of California, Hastings College of Law, called the Kickstarter vote “a hugely important step” that “signals to workers across the tech industry that it is both desirable and possible to build collective structures to influence wages, working conditions and even business decisions.”

Read the complete article here.

Data Privacy: What Californians can do about creepy data collection in 2020

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From today’s The Mercury News:

Starting New Year’s Day, Californians creeped out by the trove of personal data companies collect on their online shopping, searching and social media habits will get sweeping new privacy rights that will let them opt out of having their information sold or shared and let them demand that it be deleted.

“This is really a watershed moment for consumers,” said Scott W. Pink, a Menlo Park lawyer who advises companies on cybersecurity and privacy. “It’s the first law in the United States outside specialized industries like health care that provides consumers some degree of control and access over data collected on them.”

The California Consumer Privacy Act approved in June 2018 was inspired by public outrage over data breaches at major companies such as Facebook, Yahoo and Equifax that exposed consumers to potential fraud and misuse of their personal information, and by the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation.

The new law requires that businesses disclose their data gathering and sharing practices and allows consumers to opt out of it and to demand that businesses delete collected information on them. It prohibits companies from penalizing consumers with higher rates or fewer services for exercising their privacy rights and from selling information about children under age 16 without their explicit consent.

But questions continue to swirl as companies scramble to comply. The state attorney general is still finalizing proposed regulations intended to guide consumers and businesses in order to meet a July deadline when enforcement is expected to begin.

And both consumer and business advocates continue to spar over whether the new privacy provisions go too far or not far enough, with proposed state and federal substitutes in the works.

Read the complete article here.