Tag: data privacy

Privacy Collision: Data On How You Drive Reveals Where You Drive

A heads up to Jaikumar Vijayan over at Computerworld.com for picking up on this really interesting study (PDF) conducted at the University of Denver that shows how driver monitoring technology that is becoming very popular in the insurance industry may constitute a big breach of privacy. If you haven’t heard of them before, use-based insurance (or so-called “Pay as You Drive” or PAYD) programs are all the rage in the auto insurance industry. They make a lot of sense: rather than penalize good drivers for the crummy driving of others, leverage on board technology within the insured vehicle to monitor the miles traveled, speed, braking and other vital statistics. The technology allows infrequent, safe drivers to pay much lower premiums, while drivers who rack up tens of thousands of miles a month, or career around the roads at breakneck speeds to pay premiums that are appropriate given the amount of driving and […]

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FDA Will Regulate Some Apps As Medical Devices

In an important move, the U.S. Food And Drug Administration (FDA) has released final guidance to mobile application developers that are creating medical applications to run on devices like the iPhone and Android mobile devices. Some applications, it said, will be treated with the same scrutiny as traditional medical devices.* The statement is the final word from the FDA on the approach it will take when enforcing federal regulations regarding the safety of medical devices to the large and fast-growing category of medical applications. The agency said on Monday that, while it doesn’t see the need to vet “the majority of mobile apps,” because they pose “minimal risk to consumers,” it will exercise oversight of mobile medical applications that are accessories to regulated medical devices, or that transform a mobile device into a regulated medical device. In those cases, the FDA said that mobile applications will be assessed “using the same […]

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Internet of Things Demands New Social Contract To Protect Privacy

Changes brought about by the Internet of Things demands the creation of a whole new social contract to enshrine the right to privacy and prevent the creation of technology-fueled Orwellian surveillance states in which individual privacy protections take a back seat to security and “control.” That, according to an opinion piece penned by the head of the European Commission’s Knowledge Sharing Unit. Gérald Santucci, in an essay written for the web site privacysurgeon.org, argues that technology advances, including the advent of wearable technology and the combination of inexpensive, remote sensors and Big Data analytics threaten to undermine long-held notions like personal privacy and the rights of individuals. The essays says that current approaches to data protection are “largely inadequate” to the task of reigning in the asymmetrical changes wrought by new technology. “Data collection and video surveillance will continue to grow as ubiquitous computing pervades almost all areas of our […]

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Welcoming A New Sponsor: Mocana

You’ll notice some new artwork gracing The Security Ledger this week, and that’s because we’ve welcomed a new sponsor to the family: Mocana. I’d like to officially welcome them to the Security Ledger family.   This is a big win for Security Ledger.  Mocana will join Veracode, The Trusted Computing Group and Gemalto in underwriting The Security Ledger’s coverage of IT security news and the intersection of security with The Internet of Things (IoT). But we also win the support of a company that is all about IoT.   If you haven’t already checked out Mocana, I’d urge you to do so. Launched in 2004, the company’s expertise is in securing non-traditional endpoints. Mocana’s Device Security Framework, a suite of device-resident security software that is embedded into devices during the manufacturing process. DSF is a platform that supports a wide range of security functions, both through Mocana-created security modules and support of other […]

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BitSight: A Equifax For Security Risk?

I’ve opined in these pages and elsewhere that one of the big problems in the IT security space is the absence of actionable data. After all, problems like denial of service attacks, network compromises and inadvertent data leaks are all just risks that organizations and individuals must grapple with in our increasingly wired world. True – they’re new kinds of risks, but otherwise they’re not fundamentally different from problems like auto accidents, property crime or illness – things  that we do a good job accounting for. The difference, as I see it, is an absence of accepted and independent means of assessing the relative security posture of any organization. IT security is still so much dark magic: we rely on organizations to tell us about how secure they are. Organizations, in turn, rely on a complex and patchy network of security monitoring and detection tools, then try to read the […]

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