General Data Protection Regulation

I spent last week in London with my family–yes, actual vacation-esque time! It was great, except for when I was trying to keep up with news from back home.

My first stay across the Atlantic since the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation went into force May 25 brought home the unpleasant reality of some U.S. sites’ continued struggles with this privacy law. And instead of experiencing this only briefly in a Virtual Private Network session on my iPad, I got a full-time dose of it.

The biggest problem is sites such as the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times that have blocked all European access instead of providing the privacy controls required by the GDPR.

That’s not the fault of the GDPR–its provisions were set two years ago–but is the fault of Tronc, the long-mismanaged news firm formerly known as Tribune Publishing. Tronc could afford to pay $15 million to former chairman Michael Ferro after he quit facing charges of sexual abuse but apparently couldn’t afford to hire any GDPR-qualified developers. I hope the LAT can fix that now that Tronc has sold the paper, but it may be a while before I can link to any Tribune stories without annoying European readers.

With my client USA Today, the issue isn’t as bad: It provides EU readers with a stripped-down, ad- and tracking-free version of the site, which you can see at right in the screenshot above. What’s not to like about such a fast, simple version? Well, I can’t see comments on my own columns, and simply searching for stories requires switching to Google… by which I mean, Bing, since right-clicking a Google search result doesn’t let you copy the target address, and clicking through to a Google result will yield an EU-specific USAT address.

The simplest fix for these and other GDPR-compliance glitches was to fire up Private Internet Access on my laptop and connect to one of that VPN service’s U.S. locations–yes, as if I were in China. It seems a violation of the Web’s founding principles to have to teleport my browser to another continent for a task as simple as reading the news, but here we are.

I wrapped up three weeks in a row of business travel by going to Toronto for Access Now’s RightsCon conference. This was somehow my first trip to Canada’s largest city, and now I’m already looking forward to returning there next year for Collision.

5/16/2018: The Perfect Storm? Misinformation and Extremist Propaganda, RightsCon

I moderated this discussion with Institute for Strategic Dialogue project coordinator Chloe Colliver, Data & Society media-manipulation project lead Joan Donovan, and Graphika research and analysis director Camille François. It all went well, aside from when I thought the panel only ran for an hour and needed the audience to remind me that we actually had a 75-minute timeslot.

5/17/2018: Internet of (Stranger) Things: Privacy threats of the next generation of vulnerable devices, RightsCon

I’ve been quoting security researcher Bruce Schneier for years, and somehow Access saw fit to have me moderate a panel featuring him–as well as Ryerson University expert-in-residence Ann Cavoukian, Access policy manager Amie Stepanovich, and Atlantic Council fellow Beau Woods. The stage for this panel happened to feature a large fern on either side, so I had no choice but to rip off “Between Two Ferns” for my introduction.

Although RightsCon didn’t record video of either panel, a new client asked me to write up our discussion, so I recorded it on my phone; you can listen to that audio after the jump.

5/20/2018: This new smartphone feature should be used by every driver, from teen to seasoned commuter, USA Today

I wrote a cheat sheet for using the “Do Not Disturb while driving” feature Apple added to iOS 11, as well as the Android Auto app that should be in Google’s standard Android bundle but is not. Neither is all that new, but I don’t always get to write the headlines.

5/20/2018: EU to install sweeping changes to online privacy rules, PBS NewsHour

I did this remote interview with NYC-based NewsHour anchor Alison Stewart about the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation from a studio in D.C. before this afternoon’s Nats game. My last appearance on the show came in 2011; I’ll try not to wait so long before a return.

Continue reading →