Online voting is taking baby steps forward here and there -- more often there, like in Switzerland, which implemented a pilot project a few years ago -- but sometimes here, including a New York City Department of Education election that will conclude April 22. Online voting could improve people’s access to the polls, supporters said. Such is the hope of an Alabama bill that would authorize its secretary of state to develop online ballots for overseas absentee voting. Whether online voting would improve overall participation by a public increasingly accustomed to banking, shopping and communicating online, though, remains an open question, according to an analysis of the Swiss data.
The U.S. Trade Representative released a six-page summary of items under discussion in the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement negotiations Monday, after months of public interest groups clamoring for more information about the negotiations and suing for access to negotiating drafts and documents.
Working-group leaders reported progress on privacy and location, emergency communications and IPv6 specifications, in discussions at an international meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force in San Francisco. The conclusions of working group sessions at the meeting all last week are subject to broader discussion on its e-mail list and then approval by the Internet Engineering Steering Group. The open, volunteer organization runs by so-called rough consensus: Action requires the support of the great majority of those taking part.
Working-group leaders reported progress on privacy and location, emergency communications and IPv6 specifications, in discussions at an international meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force in San Francisco. The conclusions of working group sessions at the meeting all last week are subject to broader discussion on its e-mail list and then approval by the Internet Engineering Steering Group. The open, volunteer organization runs by so-called rough consensus: Action requires the support of the great majority of those taking part.
Web sites should follow uniform requirements about data collection for marketing, House Communications Subcommittee Chairman Rick Boucher, D-Va., said at a Center for Democracy & Technology gala Tuesday night. Boucher said he plans to pursue legislation along with Ranking Member Cliff Stearns, R-Fla.
The promise of health IT won’t be fulfilled unless other policies are changed to allow innovation and full use of the possibilities of an electronic system, said Mark Smith, CEO of the California HealthCare Foundation. He spoke on one of four panels organized by the journal Health Affairs to speak about its current issue devoted to health IT. A common point throughout the morning’s sessions was that health IT is not the goal; better health is the goal, and health IT alone isn’t enough to guarantee better health.
Craigslist isn’t doing as much as it should to protect children from sexual predation and isn’t even following through on the steps it has taken, Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox said. He wrote a letter to Craigslist Thursday outlining the problems his office uncovered and urged the site to take specific steps making it easier for users to seek help.
SAN FRANCISCO -- Whether a settlement gives Google Book Search the inside track for online access to the contents of books or opens access widely remains in sharp dispute as a judge’s decision approaches. Participants in the deal (WID Oct 29 p6) stressed late Friday that it provides for no exclusivity between Google and a book-rights registry that the company would finance to enable digitization approvals by authors. But critics from the Internet Archive and the Electronic Freedom Foundation countered in a debate at a State Bar of California copyright seminar that the settlement would still, in effect, give Google a monopoly over providing books online.
President Barack Obama added another online advertising lawyer to his administration Thursday with the appointment of Mary Ellen Callahan as chief privacy officer of the Department of Homeland Security. Views of Callahan’s leadership of the first industry group to tackle Internet privacy in commerce varied among the activists we surveyed from visionary or detrimental to the development of the federal privacy framework.
The precise amount of funding and the treatment of privacy considerations are close but not exactly the same in the House and Senate versions of the economic stimulus bill, which the Senate debates this week. The Senate would spend a little more on health IT -- $23.9 billion, according to Senate Appropriations Committee, vs. $20 billion in the House package, according to the House Appropriations Committee. The bulk of spending for each comes in the form of incentives through Medicare and Medicaid for doctors and hospitals to adopt electronic health record systems. The Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, which backs the bill, estimates $18 billion in each version for those incentives.