Policy Blog

Yesterday, Data Foundry signed a coalition letter addressed to the U.S. House of Representatives in support of the Email Privacy Act along with tech giants such as Facebook, Google, Amazon, IBM, Cisco Systems and other tech firms. Non-profit organizations also signed on, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU. The Email Privacy Act is a revision to ECPA, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. ECPA currently allows federal law enforcement agencies to access any electronic communications that are more than 180 days old without a warrant. This particular piece of legislation has not been updated since 1986 – eons in the world of technology — and it is in desperate need of reform.

Data Privacy Day is an international effort focused on promoting data privacy awareness that takes place on January 28 every year. The National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA) leads promotional efforts for the U.S. This non-profit organization is dedicated to promoting a safer, more secure and more trusted Internet. In addition to educating consumers on how to protect their online privacy, the organization dedicates itself to showing companies how privacy is good for business. Here are 5 of their recommendations for promoting data privacy within your company:

At Data Foundry, we’re long-time advocates for open markets and the open Internet. Over the years we have worked on several efforts to protect the open Internet with rules such as those put forth in the FCC’s Open Internet Order.

Free or open market systems usually flourish with minimal regulation. However, this isn’t always the case, and it hasn’t been the case with Internet service providers. There is a lack of competition in the U.S. broadband market due to large companies dominating it by doing whatever it takes to eliminate competition and maintain their dominion. Recently, another major threat to the open Internet has been on our minds – AT&T’s historic mergers and the practice of zero-rating. So, what exactly is zero rating?

As a technology company whose founders, Ron and Carolyn Yokubaitis, were advocates before they were entrepreneurs, Data Foundry has always been involved in policy issues concerning technology and our fundamental rights.

ICANN is the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. It is a nonprofit organization headquartered in Southern California that was formed in 1998 to help the U.S. government manage certain functions that maintain the Internet’s core infrastructure. ICANN maintains the central repository for IP addresses and helps coordinate the supply of IP addresses. It also manages the domain name system and root servers. ICANN currently manages over 180 million domain names and four billion network addresses across 240 countries. It is also important to note that which ICANN does not control, such as content on the Internet, malware or spam and Internet access.

Data Foundry has taken action against proposed changes to part of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure known as rule 41, that would promote government hacking on a massive scale. We signed a coalition letter to the U.S. Congress along with 50 other Internet companies and public interest groups, including Google, PayPal and the American Civil Liberties Union.

Ron Yokubaitis received the Internet Infrastructure Coalition’s (i2Coalition) first award for Internet Community Leadership at the Smarter Internet Forum in Philadelphia, PA today. Ron has been a leader in the Internet sphere since 1994 when he co-founded Texas.net in San Antonio, TX. Since then, he and his wife Carolyn have gone on to establish Data Foundry, Giganews(a Usenet provider) and Golden Frog (Internet security solutions). The fight for Internet privacy, open Internet and laying the groundwork for innovation are important priorities for Ron and for Data Foundry. Because of his leadership and activism to drive change in U. S. Internet policy, the i2Coalition has officially named the award the Ron Yokubaitis Internet Community Leadership Award.

One of the things that sets Data Foundry apart from its competitors is that its founders and stakeholders are fiercely advocating for digital privacy, open internet and data encryption. We also feel that it is our duty to be involved in local, state and federal policy-making when it comes to the privacy issues that affect us and our customers. Over the past couple of weeks, Congressmen Ted Poe and Pete Olson visited and toured our Texas 1 Data Center in Austin to better understand our operations and how security and privacy legislation affects our customers and the data center business in general.

Data Foundry CTO, Edward Henigin, participated as a panelist at the INCOMPAS telecommunications conference in Washington D.C. on April 12. The assembled panel of security experts sought to bring the industry’s attention to the anti-encryption debate that has sparked in Washington and around the country due to Apple’s refusal to unlock the iPhone encryption for the San Bernardino case. The recent release of the Burr-Feinstein bill proposing law enforcement be given access to data in an “intelligible” format upon court order also provoked a wave of anger and disbelief throughout the tech community.