First Privacy Bill of Rights meeting: Mobile apps targeted

A meeting on mobile applications and data privacy will be held July 12 to start enforcement of President Obama's digital Privacy Bill of Rights.

President Barack Obama walking in front of the White House.

The first in a series of meetings to decide concrete enforcement terms for President Obama's digital "Privacy Bill of Rights" has just been announced for July 12, 2012, and its focus is on mobile apps.

The National Communications and Telecommunication Administration (U.S. Department of Commerce) has decided that it's time to put President Obama's Privacy Bill of Rights into practice.

To begin, they've just invited all "privacy stakeholders" to "generate robust input" for the first consumer data transparency code of conduct.

NTIA has selected mobile app transparency as the focus of the first privacy multi-stakeholder process.

Multi-stakeholders are defined as consumer groups, advertisers, and Internet companies.

"Although other possible topics were suggested and may be pursued in future multi-stakeholder convenings, the mobile app transparency topic presents a strong opportunity for stakeholders to reach consensus on a code of conduct in a reasonable time frame," the NTIA said in its announcement.

The NTIA's first invitation to comment, in March, saw an overwhelming amount of concern about mobile applications because

(...) practices surrounding the disclosure of consumer data privacy practices do not appear to have kept pace with rapid developments in technology and business models.

Perhaps that's in part owing to widespread awareness about Apple's mobile tracking lawsuit, which it has failed to fend off.

The now-famous lawsuit, still in progress, was filed in April, and 18 companies were sued over app privacy including Apple, Facebook, Google, Path, Beluga, Yelp, Burbn, Instagram, Foursquare Labs, (the now-defunct) Gowalla, Foodspotting, Hipster, LinkedIn, Rovio Mobile, ZeptoLab, Chillingo, Electronics Arts, and Kik Interactive.

The lawsuit raised awareness that innocuous seeming apps like Instagram, Foursquare, Foodspotting, and Yelp scrape phones to send names, e-mail addresses and/or phone numbers from users' address books to their servers.

Instagram and Foursquare began to notify users with a permission prompt only after the Path debacle, according to VentureBeat.

A second, similar privacy lawsuit hasrecently been filed against Apple, Pandora, and The Weather Channel over user location data.

The NTIA multi-stakeholder privacy meeting will decide a code of conduct for app makers and much more: its intent is to create a blueprint for data transparency and also make a clear set of rules for app makers to stay within to remain out of trouble a la privacy lawsuits.

When the Obama administration released its comprehensive blueprint to improve consumers' data privacy protections in February, The White House requested that NTIA ask stakeholders -- companies, privacy advocates, consumer groups, and technology experts -- to develop enforceable codes of conduct to specify how the Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights will be applied in specific contexts.

A wide range of multi-stakeholders are invited to contribute. About who this affects, NTIA writes:

The issue of mobile app transparency potentially impacts a range of industry participants, including: developers of mobile apps; providers of sophisticated interactive services for mobile devices (such as those utilizing HTML5 to access mobile APIs); and mobile app platforms, among others.

This is only the first in a series of meetings that will address other areas of consumer data privacy.

The meeting is in Washington, D.C., and NTIA has detailed:

The July 12, 2012, multi-stakeholder meeting will begin at 9:30 a.m and is expected to end no later than 4:30 p.m.

The meeting will be held in the Washington, D.C., metro area; NTIA will announce the venue no later than fifteen (15) days before the meeting, and sooner if possible.

The meeting is open to all interested stakeholders, will be Web cast, and is open to the press.

Village targeted

Syria activists: 78 killed in village

• 35 of the victims are from one family, activists say


• Half of the dead are women and children


• Activists say the deaths happened after Syrian forces shelled the village

At least 78 people were killed in one Syrian village Wednesday, with at least half of the dead women and children, Syrian opposition activists said.

The deaths happened in Qubeir, a small farming village of 200 people in Hama province, according to the Local Coordination Committees of Syria. It blamed the deaths on Syrian government forces.

Just 10 families live in Qubeir in a cluster of about 20 homes, said Lt. Khaled Ali, a spokesman for the rebel Free Syrian Army's military council in Hama.

The Local Coordination Committees said that 35 of the dead are from one family.

Rami Abdulrahman, a spokesman for the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, another activist group, confirmed "dozens" of deaths in Qubeir but said he could not give a specific number "until all names have been confirmed."

An activist who was less than 2 miles from Qubeir also said that at least 78 people had been killed the village. He said he was working vith others to evacuate the bodies, many of which were burned.

He said 38 of the victims were men, and the rest were women and children.

The deaths happened after regime tanks shelled the village for at least an hour, activists say. Militias loyal to the regime then went through the village, executing people with knives and guns, Ali and the Local Coordination Committees said.

Ali said that Qubeir is surrounded by villages that support the Alawite regime of President Bashar al-Assad and that the militia members came from two of the neighboring villages.

Soon after the opposition groups reported the deaths in Qubeir, Syrian state TV reported that government forces were headed to the village to help.

"An official source in Hama says that the security forces have responded to calls for help and complaints from the people in al-Qubeir ... and raided a terrorist cell and killed a number of them and confiscated their weapons," state TV reported.

It said two women and a "number" of children were found dead in Qubeir with their legs and hands tied.

The incident in Qubeir follows last month's massacre of more than 100 people in the town of Houla, just south of the Hama area. Members of the U.N. Security Council have blamed the Houla massacre on government forces.

"The massacre of Qubeir is an exact repeat of what we saw in Houla," Ali said Wednesday.

Al-Assad denies that his forces were behind the Houla killings.

State TV noted that the Qubeir killings happened a day before the United Nations General Assembly and the Security Council plan to hold meetings on the 15-month Syrian crisis. It said the massacre was intended "to be used to pressure Syria."