The Morning Briefing: Data privacy

“The Morning Briefing” is SmartPlanet’s daily roundup of must-reads from the web. This morning we’re reading about data privacy.

1.) On Data Privacy Day, Twitter and Google focus on government requests. In 2009 the U.S government dubbed January 28 “Data Privacy Day.” Four years later, it’s the government’s own actions to obtain personal information that are in the spotlight, thanks to new reports from Google and Twitter.

2.) A major moment for data privacy. Companies recognise that robust privacy protections are necessary; the challenge is getting the regulation right.

3.) WhatsApp’s data collecting violates Canadian and Dutch privacy laws. According to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC) and the Dutch data authority College Bescherming Persoonsgegevens (CBP), the popular cross-platform messaging application WhatsApp violates privacy laws.

4.) Sir Tim Berners-Lee on open data, privacy, eHealth and the birth of the web. At the launch of the CSIRO’s Digital Productivity and Services Flagship, inventor of the World Wide Web Sir Tim Berners-Lee spoke on a variety of connected world topics, including the importance of making certain bits of data private, and why new projects are essentially bobsleds.

5.) Guest Blog: Data Privacy Day — Is your security blanket intact? The consumerisation of IT in businesses is here to stay. At its latest Symposium, Gartner revealed that by 2016, two-thirds of the workforce will own a smartphone and 40 per cent of the global workforce will be mobile. With this in mind, failing to ensure second to none data security within a business in this day and age can prove as risky as walking a tightrope with no harness.

Related:

• The ‘privacy visor’ that stops surveillance in its tracks
• Why nothing is private: How the FBI can read your emails
• The ’spy-free’ app you can use to stop surveillance
• Google puts a ring on it to infuriate hackers, replace passwords