Just a Theory

Trans rights are human rights

Posts about Safe Harbor

iovation Tokenization

C’est mois, in the first of a series for the iovation blog:

Given our commitment to responsible data stewardship, as well as the invalidation of Safe Harbor and the advent of the GDPR, we saw an opportunity to reduce these modest but very real risks without impacting the efficacy of our services. A number of methodologies for data protection exist, including encryption, strict access control, and tokenization. We undertook the daunting task to determine which approaches best address data privacy compliance requirements and work best to protect customers and users — without unacceptable impact on service performance, cost to maintain infrastructure, or loss of product usability.

The post covers encryption, access control, and tokenization.

A Porous “Privacy Shield”

Glyn Moody, in Ars Technica, on the proposed replacement for the recently struck-down Safe Harbor framework:

However, with what seems like extraordinarily bad timing, President Obama has just made winning the trust of EU citizens even harder. As Ars reported last week, the Obama administration is close to allowing the NSA to share more of the private communications it intercepts with other federal agencies, including the FBI and the CIA, without removing identifying information first.

In other words, not only will the new Privacy Shield allow the NSA to continue to scoop up huge quantities of personal data from EU citizens, it may soon be allowed to share them widely. That’s unlikely to go down well with Europeans, the Article 29 Working Party, or the CJEU—all of which ironically increases the likelihood that the new Privacy Shield will suffer the same fate as the Safe Harbour scheme it has been designed to replace.

So let me get this straight. Under this proposal:

  • The NSA can continue to bulk collect EU citizen data.
  • That data may be shared with other agencies in the US government.
  • Said collection must fall under six allowed case, one of which is undefined “counter-terrorism” purposes. No one ever abused that kind of thing before.
  • The US claims there is no more bulk surveillance, except that there is under those six cases.
  • The appointed “independent ombudsman” to address complaints by EU citizens will be a single US Undersecretary of State.
  • Complaints can also be addressed to US companies housing EU citizen data, even though, in the absence of another Snowden-scale whistle-blowing, they may have no idea their data is being surveiled.

Color me skeptical that this would work, let alone not be thrown out by another case similar to the one that killed Safe Harbor.

I have a better idea. How about eliminating mass surveillance?