Weekly output: Bluesky verification, brain-computer interface, Xfinity Mobile, resisting FTC commissioners, Comcast pain points

RIO DE JANEIRO–The organizers of Web Summit Rio have once again seen fit to have me moderate panels at their conference here (with my hotel paid for and my airfare to be reimbursed). And while last year I got away with only doing one panel, this year I have three: a discussion about Web3 possibilities Monday, a session on data privacy Tuesday, and a panel about AI in advertising on Wednesday.

4/21/2025: Bluesky Adds Blue Checks to Verified Accounts, But They’re Not for Sale, PCMag

Bluesky’s management continues to impress me with their thoughtful responses to problems that arise with that decentralized platform.

4/23/2025: I Controlled a Wheelchair With My Mind (Well, I Think I Did), PCMag

The research for this happened three weeks ago at NTT’s Upgrade 2025 conference in San Francisco (with that Japanese telco covering my airfare and lodging), but writing this post took some time. And then my editor had to find time of her own to edit this between all of the news breaking this month.

4/23/2025: Xfinity Mobile’s New Premium Unlimited Plan Doubles Data Without a Price Hike, PCMag

I felt a little confused covering a story about Comcast that did not involve a service costing more–especially coming a day after T-Mobile announced a rate rewrite that looks like it will amount to a large cost increase for many users.

4/24/2025: The FTC Commissioners That Trump Wants to Fire: We’re Not Going Away, PCMag

I spent Wednesday and Thursday at the privacy trade group IAPP’s annual conference in D.C. thinking that Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel interviewing Rebecca Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya, the two members of the Federal Trade Commission that Trump wants gone, would be the newsiest part. And so it was.

4/25/2025: Comcast Execs: Our Pricing Is Opaque and We Can Be Hard to Do Business With, PCMag

Because I was busy getting ready for IAPP Thursday morning, I missed the Comcast earnings call that featured executives admitting the “pain points” the company had created with its customers. Fortunately, nobody else at PCMag picked up the story before I could get to it Friday.

#blueCheck #blueCheckmark #bluecheck #Bluesky #BlueskyVerification #brainComputerInterface #Comcast #ComcastRates #FederalTradeCommision #FTC #IAPP #NTT #NTTUpgrade2025 #pricingTransparency #RebeccaSlaughter #wheelchair #Xfinity #XfinityMobile

Somewhat older, aber da es soeben im #IAPP Knowledgenet angesprochen wurde: Fragebogen Löschung im Rahmen des „Coordinated Enforcement Framework“ (CEF): Artikel 17 #DSGVO Self-Check | Der Landesbeauftragte für den Datenschutz und die Informationsfreiheit Baden-Württemberg
https://www.baden-wuerttemberg.datenschutz.de/artikel-17-ds-gvo-self-check/

10 Tips for Global Compliance with #Privacy and #DataProtection Laws

By the #IAPP Privacy Bar Section Advisory Board 2024

@privacy_news @iapp

“Governance is méér dan compliance”, vertelt Ashley Casovan, managing director van het AI Governance Center van de International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP).
https://www.agconnect.nl/maatschappij/artificial-intelligence/ai-governance-wacht-op-standaarden-gedragscodes-en-praktijk
#AI #AIgovernance #IAPP
#AGConnect #SijthoffMedia

Wow. Just returning from the #IAPP Privacy, Security, Risk conference, talking about corp & organizational data privacy and risk for 3 days. Just booked a ride home and the confirmation email included -- in the clear -- all cancelled orders from today, including PII, nationally. Impressive #PrivacyFail, even without my bias.

#Privacy #DataProtection

I would like to again humbly request to those running the IAPP website to not force people to turn on JavaScript in order to access said website's content.

#IAPP #Privacy

No.

no no no no no no

bad IAPP website

go to your corner and think about what you did

then get back to your computer and make your website functional with JavaScript turned off

#IAPP #privacy #JavaScript #accessibility

I’m heading to Dulles before dawn tomorrow, but not for work: I’m flying to Dallas to try to see the solar eclipse, a friend having invited people to visit for the occasion. Please wish us luck with the weather!

4/3/2024: Ad Industry Unbothered by Federal Privacy Law (Because It’ll Probably Never Happen), PCMag

I wrote this from the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Public Policy and Legal Summit mindful of my past excessive optimism about Congress passing a comprehensive privacy law–and then Sunday brought news of another such attempt, the introduction of the American Privacy Rights Act by Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R.-Wash.) and Sen. Maria Cantwell (D.-Wash.). I would love to see this headline age as badly as the one PCMag ran above a January 2023 post of mine–“Is This the Year Congress Finally Tackles Privacy Legislation?”–but I’m not going to get my hopes up just yet.

4/3/2024: FCC to Try Again on Net-Neutrality Rules at April 25 Meeting, PCMag

Speaking of tech-policy stories that have been going on forever, I wrote about the latest twist in the net-neutrality plot: the Federal Communications Commission’s scheduled date to vote for rules reinstating strong rules along the lines of the net-neutrality regulations it passed in 2015 and then smashed the “delete” key on in 2017.

4/5/2024: In this California valley, machine vision meets grapevines, Fast Company

I did some of my most scenic reporting in Sonoma County two weeks ago to check out how one vineyard there is applying robotics and electric-vehicle technology to tend its vines in a greener way–while collecting much more data about them along the way.

4/5/2024: Facebook Really, Really Doesn’t Want You to Read This One Story, PCMag

I was going to spend Thursday afternoon writing about an exceptionally-informative panel about the hazards of age-verification requirements that I’d watched at the International Association of Privacy Professional’s Global Privacy Summit, but then I saw Bluesky lighting up with posts about Facebook not only blocking a Kansas Reflector op-ed critical of its downranking of climate-change discussions and then bulk-deleting every Facebook post sharing any link to the Reflector’s site. The story got increasingly bizarre as I exchanged e-mails with two editors at that publication–one of 39 funded around the U.S. by the nonprofit States Newsroom–while Meta limited its PR efforts to a vague and unhelpful tweet from publicist Andy Stone. Only on Saturday did it get into more specifics, in the form of a series of replies to Bluesky posts by Instagram head Adam Mosseri in which he said the problem was a phishing-site filter going awry.

4/6/2024: How manufacturing is discovering new virtuous circles as it moves toward a more circular economy, Fast Company

The last piece I wrote for the Most Innovative Companies project–I did the interview for this from National Airport on my way to Barcelona for MWC Feb. 23, then wrote and filed it from Newark Airport a few hours later–was also the last to be published.

https://robpegoraro.com/2024/04/07/weekly-output-online-advertising-and-privacy-net-neutrality-vote-vineyard-robotics-meta-content-moderation-run-amok-manufacturing-gone-green/

#circularEconomy #cleantech #FacebookBlockingLinks #FacebookContentModeration #FCC #greentech #IAB #IAPP #KansasReflector #netNeutrality #onlinePrivacy #privacyLaw #sustainability

Heute und morgen auf der Agenda des Global #Privacy Summits der International Association of Privacy Professionals (#IAPP):

🔹 EU #KI-Verordnung (Schwerpunktthema)
🔹 EU-US Data Privacy Framework
🔹 Consumer Consent in the Future of Trusted Commerce
🔹 Privacy Litigation Trends
🔹 Altersverifikation: #Datenschutz und #Datensicherheit

Komplettes Programm:
https://iapp.org/conference/global-privacy-summit/schedule-and-program-gps24/

#AiAct #KünstlicheIntelligenz TADPF #EUDPF #PrivacyShield #TeamDatenschutz

🌸 REGISTER NOW: Join us for our 2nd Annual #CDTSpringFling, Tues. April 2nd from 8-10:30 pm at Dirty Habit DC, during IAPP's Global Privacy Summit. Tickets + sponsorships here: https://cdt.org/event/2024-spring-fling/ #IAPP

🌸 REGISTER NOW: Join us for our 2nd Annual #CDTSpringFling, Tues. April 2nd from 8-10:30 pm at Dirty Habit DC, during IAPP's Global Privacy Summit. Tickets + sponsorships here: https://cdt.org/event/2024-spring-fling/ #IAPP

🌸 REGISTER NOW: Join us for our 2nd Annual #CDTSpringFling, Tues., April 2nd from 8-10:30 pm at Dirty Habit DC during #IAPP’s Global Privacy Summit. Tickets + sponsorships here: https://cdt.org/event/2024-spring-fling/

Interessante Analyse des aktuellen Stands des #AiActs aus #Datenschutz-Sicht.

Die #DSGVO kennt Ausnahmen vom Verbot der Verwendung sensibler Daten, aber nicht für das Korrigieren von #KI-Vorurteilen und -Diskriminierung (debiasing). 🤖

Gastbeitrag von @Frederik_Borgesius und Marvin van Bekkum beim Internationalen Verband der Datenschutzbeauftragten #IAPP:

EN: https://iapp.org/news/a/the-ai-acts-debiasing-exception-to-the-gdpr/

#TeamDatenschutz #KünstlicheIntelligenz #AIAct

Today, I took a closer look at the website of the "International Association of #Privacy Professionals" [sic] #IAPP.

Interesting news section, but #RSS feed mentioned nowhere ( it's https://iapp.org/rss/ )

#GoogleFonts, #GoogleTagManager, #cloudflare.

Accounts with #Twitter, #Instagram, #Facebook, #YouTube, but none on the #Fediverse. Except maybe the zero-posts, dead @iapp or @privacy_news (are these even legit?).

Will drop by again next year, maybe some minimal improvements by then.

For those wondering what the current #EU #AIAct draft actually deals with: Oliver Patel from #IAPP has created a high-level #CheatSheet. Thank you!
#AI #KI
https://iapp.org/resources/article/eu-ai-act-cheat-sheet/

Me and Hannes Saarinen did a talk on #privacy in modern software development at #IAPP #DPC23 (no, not the PHP conference with the same hashtag 😀).

Competing for audience against the #EDPB Chair in the same timeslot, we managed to pull a full house! Thanks to all who came!

There were other presenters talking about the same thing. Earlier that morning, #Flutter’s Veroniki Stamati-Koromina had really insightful stuff on a Privacy by Design panel. You could clearly hear the experience talking. Next day, #Vodafone’s Henri Kujala and #Privado’s Vaibhav Antil continued on a very similar theme.

I’ll paraphrase some of the key things from our talk:

It’s important to understand the structure of the #ProductManagement organization as well as the product portfolio and backlog. You don’t want an impedance mismatch between the privacy/security function and the product management.

Scalability can only be attained by building the capabilities into product management and engineering. This requires trust; trust needs to be well-founded, but without it you’ll either burn yourself out or start creating queues and delays. (I had three deep hallway track discussions on this very topic.)

Security and privacy functions need to mesh together. Product and engineering need the support from a single point of contact. Sometimes it’ll be privacy who leads the discussion (and security follows), sometimes the other way around. The closer you get to the actual implementation the likelier it is that security will be the driver.

If scaling is your challenge, try to make your security engineers to be fake lawyers, and your lawyers to be fake engineers. You can always consult each other on difficult things, but you can often get to a 80/20 situation without having to use everyone.

Flying is too cheap.

I just compensated my Brussels #IAPP #DPC23 trip's carbon emissions by buying #SAF (sustainable aviation fuel) into #Finnair's system.

The price was 230 eur. Yes, that's a lot for an individual given the rock-bottom subsidised fares we enjoy now, but at the same time, if the value one gets from a flight couldn't take that hit - maybe the flight is not worth taking?

This sort of additional cost ought to be regulated into ticket prices all across the EU, immediately.

"#iapp Europe Data Protection Congress 2023" #KI

https://www.dr-datenschutz.de/iapp-europe-data-protection-congress-2023/

#IAPP 2023 in Brüssel: BlnBDI Meike Kamp diskutierte gestern auf dem Europäischen #Datenschutzkongress mit Datenschützern aus ganz Europa über die Vereinbarkeit von personalisierter digitaler #Werbung und #Datenschutz sowie über die Auswirkungen des #DigitalMarketsAct und der #DigitalServicesAct auf #Adtech.

Wojciech Wiewiórowski, @EDPS_supervisor, taking part in #IAPP Europe #DataProtection Congress 2023 to speak in panel Orchestrating a Symphony: Harmonising #Privacy with Other Policy Considerations #DPC23