Regulations or Legislation for Data Protection in Nigeria? A Call for a Clear Legislative Framework

Personal information or personally identifiable data is a subject that people have become aware of the need to protect. And the challenge of legislating for data protection in today’s world is that which many nations have taken seriously. Nigeria as a developing nation appears not to be left out of this as the NITDA has released a set of guidelines in this regard as a means to offer some protection. This article examines legislations on the Nigerian landscape that resemble data protection legislation like the Official Secrets Act, the Freedom of Information Act and the most recent NITDA Draft Guidelines for data protection with a view to show the adequacy or otherwise. The guidelines were examined in some detail. The paper summarily compares the present landscape with the European Union standard and concludes that Nigeria does not have adequate data protection legislation. The paper concludes that strong legislation is desirable to protect personal data in Nigeria

Much Ado about Spam: Unsolicited Advertising, the Internet, and You.

Internet users need protection from unsolicited commercial emails (UCEs), and this protection should come from federal legislation. Despite seventeen states having passed some sort of legislation regulating UCEs, this is insufficient to protect Internet users from UCEs. State laws are not uniformed and UCEs frequently cross state lines. Internet advertisers prefer commercial emails because of the ability to market to millions of consumers at a low cost. Consumers, however, suffer delays to their Internet access because of the amount of data UCEs accumulate, and in some cases may have to pay additional fees if they exceed the data limits of their plan. Internet advertisers argue the First Amendment provides commercial speech protection to UCEs. Regulations on forms of commercial speech—door-to-door solicitations, mass mailings, telemarketing calls, and facsimile machine advertisements—have been found constitutional by the United States Supreme Court. In weighing the interest of the commercial speaker and the recipient, the Court upholds regulations that constrain commercial speech so long as the regulation allows the recipient the right to decline or accept the receipt of unsolicited advertising. Congress should pass the Unsolicited Commercial Mail Act of 2000 (the Act) proposed by New Mexico Representative, Heather Wilson. The Act would require regulations including: the commercial email be inconspicuous, not be misleading, provide consumers with an opt-out clause, and include a valid return email address. In Central Hudson Gas & Electric Corp. v. Public Service Commission, the Court developed a four-prong test to determine whether commercial speech falls within the protections of the First Amendment: speech must concern a lawful activity, speech may not be misleading, regulation must serve a substantial governmental interest, and regulation must directly advance the interest. Because the Act gives Internet users the right to control what they receive, as with other forms of commercial advertisements, the Act is no more extensive than reasonably necessary in serving the interests of Internet users

Reputation as Public Policy for Internet Security: A Field Study

Cybersecurity is a national priority in this big data era. Because of the lack of incentives and the existence of negative externality, companies often underinvest in addressing security risks and accidents, despite government and industry recommendations. In the present article, we propose a method that utilizes reputation through information disclosure to motivate companies to behave pro-socially, improving their Internet security. Using outbound spam as a proxy for Internet security, we conducted a quasi-experimental field study for eight countries through SpamRankings.net. This outgoing-spam-based study shows that information disclosure on outgoing spam can help reduce outgoing spam, approximately by 16 percent. This finding suggests that information disclosure can be leveraged to encourage companies to reduce security threats. It also provides support for public policies that require mandatory reporting from organizations and offers implications for evaluating and executing such policies

Spartan Daily, October 5, 2004

Volume 123, Issue 26https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/10030/thumbnail.jp

Understanding the behaviour and influence of automated social agents

Soft-bound submitted: Fri 23 Feb 2018 Corrections submitted: Mon 30 Jul 2018 Corrections approved: Tue 7 Aug 2018 Apollo submitted: Wed 22 Aug 2018 Hard-bound submitted: Fri 24 Aug 2018Online social networks (OSNs) have seen a remarkable rise in the presence of automated social agents, or social bots. Social bots are the new computing viral, that are surreptitious and clever. What facilitates the creation of social agents is the massive human user-base and business-supportive operating model of social networks. These automated agents are injected by agencies, brands, individuals, and corporations to serve their work and purpose; utilising them for news and emergency communication, marketing, social activism, political campaigning, and even spam and spreading malicious content. Their influence was recently substantiated by coordinated social hacking and computational political propaganda. The thesis of my dissertation argues that automated agents exercise a profound impact on OSNs that transforms into an array of influence on our society and systems. However, latent or veiled, these agents can be successfully detected through measurement, feature extraction and finely tuned supervised learning models. The various types of automated agents can be further unravelled through unsupervised machine learning and natural language processing, to formally inform the populace of their existence and impact.Sep'14-Aug'17, Marie Curie ITN METRICS, Early-Stage Researcher Sep'17, UMobile, Research Associate Oct'17-Mar'18, EPSRC Global Challenges Research Fund, Research Associat

Applying Tort Theory To Information Technology

In this article, I discuss the issue of whether torts attributable to Information Systems products, both hardware and software, should be subject to litigation as a contract action, a tort action, or both. I further suggest a protocol for attorneys and courts to consider when attempting to discern whether a particular cause of action is appropriate. Last, I briefly discuss whether the advent of certification programs for computer professionals should result in the courts reconsideration of the concept of computer malpractice