Under Code, Apps Would Disclose Collection of Data

A variety of groups, including app developers and consumer advocates, have agreed to test a voluntary code of conduct that would require participating app developers to offer short-form notices about whether their apps collect certain personal details from users — including health and social networking data — or share user-specific data with entities like advertising networks or consumer data resellers.

The idea is to allow people to compare the data collection practices of, say, flashlight apps and choose one that does not ingest unrelated material like their photos or contact lists. The determination that the notices are ready for testing is the outcome of yearlong negotiations — convened by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, a division of the United States Commerce Department — to increase mobile app transparency for consumers. Participants included app developers, digital marketing, civil liberties, consumer and privacy groups.

On Thursday, many participants in the process voted to support a version of the code drafted by a diverse coalition including the Application Developers Alliance, an industry association, and advocacy groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and the World Privacy Forum.

Although major mobile app developers like Apple and Google, which develops mobile apps for its Android platform, have not indicated whether they intend to sign on to the code of conduct, groups involved in drafting it say it is a significant advance in mobile privacy for consumers — and an unusual agreement among industry and consumer advocates.

“It’s a victory for common sense,” said Tim Sparapani, vice president for law, policy and government relations at the Application Developers Alliance, a group representing more than 100 companies and 20,000 individual developers.

But other participants in the negotiations said the notices would do little to give individual consumers more insight into or control over the vast piles of information about them that online entities collect and analyze. The notices would display only a limited list of data collection categories, they say, and would not allow consumers to opt out of data-mining or even see the records companies had amassed about them.

“A very modest slice of privacy was put forward,” for the groups to tackle, said Susan Grant, the director of consumer protection at the Consumer Federation of America, a research and advocacy organization representing about 300 consumer groups. “As time went on, that slice became more and more narrowed.”

She abstained from the vote Thursday on whether to support the code.

In the past, the app industry has been heavily criticized by some federal regulators and consumer advocates for collecting personal details from users without their knowledge or consent. A review last year by the Federal Trade Commission of 400 popular children’s apps available on Google and Apple platforms concluded that only 20 percent disclosed their data collection practices.

The code of conduct would require participating mobile app developers to show notices indicating whether their apps collected user-specific details in any of eight categories: biometrics, including fingerprints or facial recognition data; Web browsing history; logs of phone calls or texts made or received; contact list details like e-mail addresses or social network connections; financial information, like credit or banking data; health or medical data; precise location data; and stored text, video or photo files.

Signatories to the code would also have to list any of eight categories of entities with which their apps shared information; these include ad networks; mobile carriers; consumer data resellers; data analytics companies; government entities; operating systems; social networks; or other apps.

Companies that violated a promise to adhere to the code would be subject to enforcement action by the Federal Trade Commission. The code is the first step in a larger plan by the Obama administration to institute a wide-ranging consumer privacy bill of rights that would give consumers some rights to access, control and correct the personal details companies collected about them.

Last year, the White House issued a report proposing that Congress enact such a consumer privacy bill. The report said the bill would rely on codes of conduct, worked out in industry-advocacy group negotiations, to specify how different industries would adhere to those principles. The administration has yet to make public the proposed text for the legislation.

But some participants who helped develop the mobile app transparency notices said the modest gains that resulted for consumers indicated a need for stronger privacy legislation and regulation.

“If we want to move expeditiously through bigger issues, we are going to need some legislative action,” said Christopher Calabrese, legislative counsel for privacy issues at the Washington office of the A.C.L.U. 

Hands-on: LittleSnapper becomes Ember, with powerful collection features

The word “scrapbooking” may conjure visions of arts-and-crafts sessions for children with paper, scissors, and glue. But if you’ve ever done research for a project that required you to save data like images, videos, and webpages from different sources, you’re already familiar with the adult version of this activity.

To that end, Realmac Software on Tuesday released Ember (Mac App Store link), a $50 app aimed squarely at professional users who need to build a library with all sorts of digital information.

Ember is the successor to LittleSnapper, which has been around for many years and developed quite a following; true to its past, the app continues to allow you to take screenshots and annotate them with drawings or text; you can also rotate and crop the screenshots you take to make sure that the information you actually want to highlight is front and center.

In addition, the app also allows you to capture and store entire webpages, either directly through a built-in Web browser, or by subscribing to a site’s RSS feed. Once inside the app, the pages are treated like every other image, and can be manipulated by the same means. If you’ve ever done any kind of Web design work, the ability to just scribble and type some text on a document is going to be of great use—particularly when coupled with the app’s sharing features, which allow you to send any piece of data to a friend or colleague using a variety of methods.

Speaking of the Web, Ember also ships with a set of extensions that can be installed directly in your browser—both Safari and Google’s Chrome are supported—which allow you to dynamically capture webpages.

Ember sports a slick interface whose every little detail has been thought out with almost fanatical attention
Given the amount of information that you are likely to collect in an app like Ember, I was curious to find out how good its search capabilities are.

For starters, you can attach an arbitrary number of tags to each piece of information that you add to a collection; these are displayed in a convenient utility window to help ensure that you do not inadvertently duplicate a tag and make your data harder to search on.

The app also supports full-text search against all your collections and scraps, using a convenient “live-fill” mechanism that shows you the results visually while you type your search query.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem that the contents of a webpage are included in the search database; this would be a nice addition for the future.

The app's scrabooking capabilities extend to entire web pages—which can be manipulated and annotate just like every other image.
Ember is an extremely slick app whose developers have paid fanatical attention to every detail of the user experience. As a result, you can find little touches all over the interface, from the way the software remembers the URL of a captured Web document, to its ability to automatically detect and categorize screenshots from an iPhone or iPad.

As I mentioned, the app is designed for professionals, and priced accordingly—particularly when you consider that owners of LittleSnapper don’t get any breaks in the form of a upgrade discounts. If you work in a visual field like Web development or graphics design, however, Ember seems well poised to pay for itself in no time, and make your life much easier.

Lawmakers: NSA phone records collection violated law

The U.S. National Security Agency and Department of Justice exceeded their legal authority to conduct surveillance when collecting the telephone records of millions of U.S. residents, several U.S. lawmakers said Wednesday.

Several members of the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee, both Republicans and Democrats, ripped into representatives of the DOJ and the U.S. intelligence community for their collection of U.S. phone call records, saying the bulk collection violates Patriot Act restrictions that limit surveillance to information relevant to an antiterrorism investigation.

Representative John Conyers Jr., a Michigan Democrat, called on the agencies to stop the data- collection program.
“We never, at any point in this debate, have approved the type of unchecked, sweeping surveillance of United States citizens employed by our government,” he said during a hearing on the NSA. “If the government cannot provide a clear, public explanation for how its program is consistent with the statute, it must stop collecting this information immediately.”

Other committee members said they will look for ways to amend the Patriot Act to stop the NSA’s collection of U.S. telephone records. Even without more immediate changes in the law, Congress isn’t likely to reauthorize the business-records collection provision in the Patriot Act when it expires in late 2015, unless the NSA scales back its surveillance, said Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, a Wisconsin Republican and author of the original Patriot Act.

“Unless you realize you’ve got a problem, that [provision] is not going to be renewed,” Sensenbrenner told NSA and DOJ officials. “There are not the votes in the House of Representatives ... and then you’re going to lose the business-record access provision of the Patriot Act entirely. It’s got to be changed, and you have to change how you operate .... otherwise in a year-and-a-half, you’re not going to have it anymore.”
The bulk collection of U.S. phone records has made “a mockery” of the Patriot Act’s relevancy limits, Sensenbrenner said.
Several lawmakers questioned how the NSA and DOJ could view all U.S. phone records as relevant to a terrorism investigation.
“The problem, obviously, from what we’re hearing is that everything in the world is relevant,” said Representative Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat. “You’re disregarding the statute entirely.”
The bulk collection of U.S. phone records is necessary for later searches, said James Cole, deputy attorney general at the DOJ. The phone records and a related Internet communications surveillance program have helped U.S. authorities in dozens of terrorism cases, officials said.

“If you’re looking for the needle in the haystack, you have to have the entire haystack to look through, but we’re not allowed to look through that haystack willy-nilly,” Cole said.

DOJ and NSA officials defended the phone records collection program, saying the bulk collection of phone records is allowed in the Patriot Act. The collection does not violate the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, protecting U.S. residents against unreasonable searches and seizures, because, in 1979, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that telephone records aren’t private information that require a court-ordered warrant, Cole said.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and Congress both have significant oversight of the NSA surveillance programs, Cole said.

The phone records are protected because analysts never access the vast majority of them, said John Inglis, the NSA’s deputy director. In 2012, NSA analysts ran queries on fewer than 300 telephone numbers, officials have said, and analysts need to show to agency officials that those queries are relevant to a terrorism investigation before accessing the numbers, he said.
During the hearing, lawmakers raised few concerns about the PRISM program, in which the NSA collects the content of email and other Internet communications sent by people not believed to be U.S. citizens. Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed both the phone records collection and the Prism program in news stories published in early June.
“Our primary responsibility at the National Security Agency ... is to defend the nation,” Inglis said. “These programs are a core part of those efforts. We use them to protect Americans and our allies and partners worldwide.”

While officials defended the surveillance court’s review of the collection requests, several lawmakers suggested the court is a rubber stamp. Since the court was established in 1979, U.S. agencies have made nearly 34,000 surveillance requests to the court, and 490 of those were amended at the court’s request, said Representative Hakeem Jeffries, a New York Democrat. In that time, the court rejected just 11 requests, he said.

Those statistics don’t capture significant negotiations in many cases between the court and the NSA and DOJ before the judges grant the orders, said Robert Litt, general counsel for the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Several lawmakers called on the agencies to release more information about the surveillance programs and better explain to the public why the programs are necessary.

“We try very hard to keep in mind both the protection of national security and the privacy and constitutional rights of Americans,” Litt said. “We think we’ve struck that balance in the right place, but if the people in the Congress determine we’ve struck that balance in the wrong place, that’s a discussion we need to have.” 

Branded: 'Lone Ranger' Collection Pops Up at Will Leather Goods

Channel Johnny Depp's Tonto or Armie Hammer's masked John Reid in The Lone Ranger with stylish cowboy-and-Indian inspired wares from Will Leather Goods.

The Oregon-based leather accessories brand -- with a flagship store in Venice, Calif. -- has teamed up with Disney to launch a limited-edition collection of leather goods inspired by the film.

PHOTOS: 'The Lone Ranger' Character Posters Send Johnny Depp to Wild West

To celebrate the Lone Ranger's adventurous and original spirit, the collection will feature vintage hand-tooled bags as well as handcrafted belts detailed with either braided horsehair or colorful beads using traditional Native American techniques and patterns. Each belt has been designed with the help of Native American leaders and artisans to ensure its authenticity.

The Western-inspired selection, priced from $195 to $2,000, also offers tooled-leather travel kits, hand-loomed totes and wool-weaved messenger bags.

The Lone Ranger capsule collection is sold exclusively at Neiman Marcus and Will Leather Goods' flagship store (1360 Abbot Kinney Blvd.).

The Lone Ranger hits theaters July 3.

Critics question whether NSA data collection is effective

The recently revealed mass collection of phone records and other communications by the U.S. National Security Agency may not be effective in preventing terrorism, according to some critics.

 

The data collection programs, as revealed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, is giving government agencies information overload, critics said during the Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference in Washington, D.C.

 

“In knowing a lot about a lot of different people [the data collection] is great for that,” said Mike German, a former Federal Bureau of Investigation special agent whose policy counsel for national security at the American Civil Liberties Union. “In actually finding the very few bad actors that are out there, not so good.”

 

The mass collection of data from innocent people “won’t tell you how guilty people act,” German added. The problem with catching terrorism suspects has never been the inability to collect information, but to analyze the “oceans” of information collected, he said.

 

Mass data collection is “like trying to look for needles by building bigger haystacks,” added Wendy Grossman, a freelance technology writer who helped organize the conference.

 

But Timothy Edgar, a former civil liberties watchdog in the Obama White House and at the Office of Director of National Intelligence, partly defended the NSA collection programs, noting that U.S. intelligence officials attribute the surveillance programs with preventing more than 50 terrorist actions. Some critics have disputed those assertions.

 

Edgar criticized President Barack Obama’s administration for keeping the NSA programs secret. He also said it was “ridiculous” for Obama to suggest that U.S. residents shouldn’t be concerned about privacy because the NSA is collecting phone metadata and not the content of phone calls. Information about who people call and when they call is sensitive, he said.

 

But Edgar, now a visiting fellow at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, also said that Congress, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and internal auditors provide some oversight of the data collection programs, with more checks on data collection in place in the U.S. than in many other countries. Analysts can query the phone records database only if they see a connection to terrorism, he said.

 

The U.S. has some safeguards that are “meaningful and substantive, although I’m sure many in this room ... and maybe even me, if I think about it long enough, might think they’re not good enough,” Edgar said.

 

While German noted that the NSA has reported multiple instances of unauthorized access by employees to the antiterrorism databases, Edgar defended the self-reporting. “It’s an indication of a compliance system that’s actually meaningful and working,” he said. “If you had a compliance system that said there was no violation, there were never any mistakes, there was never any improper targeting that took place ... that would an indication of a compliance regime that was completely meaningless.”

 

The mass data collection combined with better data analysis tools translates into an “arms race” where intelligence officials try to find new connections with the data they collect, said Ashkan Soltani, a technology and privacy consultant. New data analysis tools lead intelligence officials to believe they can find more links to terrorism if they just have “enough data,” but that belief is “too much sci fi,” he said.

 

“This is the difficult part, if you’re saying that if we have enough data we’ll be able to predict the future,” the ACLU’s German said.

 

Many U.S. intelligence officials are suspect of tech vendor claims about predictive analysis, Edgar countered. However, link analysis—the tracking of suspects through communications with other known criminals or terrorists—is a “very powerful tool,” he said. It may be possible to use sophisticated cryptographic techniques to do that kind of analysis without the bulk collection of phone records, he said.

 

“The [internal] compliance regime is not the best answer for privacy,” Edgar said. “The best answer is not to take the data in the first place, then you don’t have to worry about compliance.”

 

The ACLU has concerns about link analysis, because it creates a massive list of suspicious people that overwhelms investigators, German said. “What link analysis creates is suspicion upon the people that suspicious people are linked to,” he said. “That growing cloud of suspicion can never been cleared.”

 

 

Suit, Tie, Bronzer: Tom Ford Launching Skincare Collection for Men

Tom Ford has always been the man when it comes to making men look dapper, at least when clothes are concerned. But come fall, the designer responsible for Justin Timberlake's drool-worthy suit and tie metamorphosis will add another element to modern manly style with the launch of his first-ever skincare line for men.

According to WWD, the luxury line, simply called Tom Ford for Men, will be comprised of nine products including a face cleanser, moisturizer, eye treatment, purifying mud mask, concealer and bronzing gel. Ford also plans to add two new colognes to his existing Private Blend collection.

The line will join Ford's women's beauty line, which launched with twelve lipstick shades in 2010 followed by a full offering of color cosmetics in 2011 and ranges in price from $30 for a nail lacquer to $90 for powdered bronzer.