Part One of Seven-Part Blog Series by Guest Blogger Patrick Taylor
The recent Apple-FBI controversy has highlighted the fact that our government, obligated to protect our privacy in some contexts, actively undermines it in others. The same internal conflict of interest is responsible, at least in part, for the U.S. government’s recent proposal to revise longstanding regulations to protect people who participate in research.
The proposals emerged last September, 2015, and were hailed as the first major reworking of the regulations in several decades, four years after an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking buried somewhat different approaches to the same desired adverse privacy effects in a tome of hundreds of pages. It’s a safe bet that few if any members of the public not professionally involved ever read them. The feds gave themselves four years to consider and devise the current proposal, but they gave the public about four months to consider it and with no evident structured interaction with public opinion. Read More