May 2014

AT&T Mobility won't have to remove cellular coverage-boosting equipment from a utility pole a handful of Mountain View residents claim is ugly, unsafe and potentially noisy. The City Council rejected an appeal filed by Barbara Bernstein, Richard Schwachter and Anna Stepanov in response to a zoning administrator's recent decision to allow the company to place part of the equipment lower on the pole than was originally approved. The "outdoor distributed antenna system" is one of a dozen AT&T received permission to install in 2012. Typically mounted on utility poles, the technology helps close gaps in cellular coverage.

Finnish students and teachers didn’t need laptops and iPads to get to the top of international education rankings, said Krista Kiuru, minister of education and science at the Finnish Parliament. And officials say they aren’t interested in using them to stay there.

That’s in stark contrast to what reformers in the US say. From President Barack Obama on down, they have called education technology critical to improving schools. By shifting around $2 billion in existing funds and soliciting $2 billion in contributions from private companies, the Obama administration is pressing to expand schools’ access to broadband and the devices that thrive on it. School districts nationwide have loaded up students with billions of dollars’ worth of tablets, laptops, iPods and more on the theory that, as President Obama said, preparing American kids to compete with students around the globe will require interactive, individualized learning experiences driven by new technology. But with little education technology in the classroom, Finnish students have repeatedly outperformed American students on international tests. In 2001, Finland’s students were the highest-achieving in the world, according to the Programme for International Student Assessment test administered by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The Nordic country uses innovative teaching strategies in the classroom, just generally without incorporating technology. Private schools and charter schools aren’t part of the mix, and all education is essentially free. Powerful teachers unions work hand in hand with the government, which went to great lengths to revamp teacher training. The profession is revered and respected, and government has no bearing on assessing a teacher’s performance in the classroom.

Privacy advocates are glad that the Federal Trade Commission outlined some potential problems with companies that collect and sell people’s data, but say it’s only a first step.

After the FTC released its call for new legislation on “data brokers”, Center for Digital Democracy executive director Jeffrey Chester called the effort “insufficient.” “The real problem is that data brokers -- including Google and Facebook -- have embraced a business model designed to collect and use everything about us and our friends -- 24/7,” he said. “Legislation is required to help stem the tide of business practices purposeful designed to make a mockery out of the idea of privacy for Americans.”

American Civil Liberties Union legislative counsel Christopher Calabrese said that the FTC itself needed to be doing more with its current powers “to root out bad practices now.” That could include action under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, he said, which bans various forms of discrimination that the FTC alleged are made possible through data merchants’ repackaging of consumers' information.

“Strongly enforcing those laws is a first step toward curbing the harms that come from the buying and selling of detailed personal profiles of every nearly every American,” Calabrese said.

Microsoft Research has developed a new framework for automatically figuring out which lines of code inside massive systems might conflict with corporate privacy policies.

It’s an important goal in today’s technology world where ever-present threats of data breaches and lawsuits, as well as the specter of looming government regulation, have smart companies preparing for whatever might come their way. The really novel thing about Microsoft’s framework is that it was designed to bring together teams of personnel that might never interact directly otherwise, so that the compliance process is faster and less prone to errors.

The system involves a high-level language called Legalease, which lets lawyers and policy employees encode corporate privacy policies into a machine-readable format, and a tool called Grok that inventories big data systems and checks them against those policies. “Ultimately, the truth about what’s happening with this data is in the code,” researcher Saikat Guha explained.

But with millions of lines of code (a fair amount of which changes daily) in a product such as Bing -- on which the Microsoft Research project was prototyped -- it can be difficult to figure out what data is being stored where, how it’s being used as part of any given job and whether that usage complies with privacy rules.

Guha and his team hope the new framework though will speed the process and make it more accurate by letting all of these steps occur in parallel.