With Congress returned from the August recess, the technology community and consumers nationwide continue to await action on data privacy – namely, legislation that will strengthen and harmonize data privacy protections while promoting continued U.S. leadership in innovation.

Each month, Mathilde Collin, CEO and co-founder of collaboration software provider Front, gives a presentation to the entire company where she shares how things are going. "It's important that everyone knows everything," says Collin in an article on Fast Company. "Our product is aimed at sharing as much as possible. In-boxes are public, and everyone can see every support request or customer review. People know the good and bad."

Just as everyone was headed out of Washington for the Memorial Day weekend, CNBC did a report on Google’s Two Years of Forgetting Europeans. It was a useful summary of the material Google publishes in its transparency report on European privacy requests for search removals.  It noted such interesting facts as that Google has removed 43% of the URLs they have reviewed and processed and that Facebook was the most frequently removed URL. But the report strangely missed a major legal development that threatens a stable international understanding about the limits of domestic law in age of global communications networks. This stable understanding is that national governments have control over the Internet within their own borders.  They have right and the obligation to make the rules of the road for Internet conduct occurring within their own borders. But they don’t have the right to extend their local laws to Internet conduct within the jurisdiction of other cou ...

Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that it would allow companies to publicly report more details about the government’s demands for user data under national security authorities. This is a very significant improvement over current law, but the enhanced disclosures still fall short of the recommendations provided by thePresident’s Review Group and the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB).   It also falls short of broadly supportive legislative proposals , providing less detailed reports on the number of requests and continuing to prohibit companies from specifying what provision of law authorized the order (for example, Section 702 or 703 of FISA).

The latest transparency report , released by Google today, contains a robust call to Congress to update the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) to include a bright-line warrant-for-content requirement.