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Project Counsel Media is part of The Project Counsel Group. We cover the areas of cyber security, digital technology, legal technology, media, and mobile technology.
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THE 12 MARCH 2012 WEEKEND "BONG" REPORT:
selected news from the e-discovery and information governance communities, with additional contributions from our cyber security and digital media communities
This weekend's lead story:
The EU to its citizens: "We will protect your data!! Well, as soon as some of us figure out how the internet works!"

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Curated by:
Catarina Conti
Social Media Manager
Project Counsel Media
12 March 2021 (Brussels, Belgium) - This issue of BONG! marks the start of our expanded and enhanced global legal technology coverage through our new partners, The Maas Consulting Group and ComplexDiscovery Solutions. Details were provided in our recent press release which you can read here.
We intend to go beyond the usual news and provide a look at the trends and technologies that have accelerated the convergence of the discrete yet mutually inclusive domains we have covered for 20+ years: cybersecurity, digital media, and legal technology.
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THIS WEEK'S EDITION IS SPONSORED BY:
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This week's lead story:
The EU to its citizens: "We will protect your data!! Well, as soon as some of us figure out how the internet works!"
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“A number of government agencies in Sweden pass on personal data belonging to individuals who visit their websites to Google despite guaranteeing anonymity. More than 80 government agencies and over 150 authorities pass on personal data in the form of IP addresses belonging to those using their websites without informing them. The information is then stored on servers in the United States, making the issue more sensitive as personal data protection is not as strong as within the European Union.”
We are given the example of Statistics Sweden, which had more than 10 million visits last year alone. The agency’s communications director seemed "surprised" to learn the site has been forwarding IP addresses to Google for over two years. Since Radio Sweden News broke the story, several Swedish agencies and authorities have removed Google Analytics from their websites.
Yep. The transgressions weren't intentional. They were based on ... ignorance. Astrid Nilsson is our Swedish freelance staffer and she did some digging into Swedish news reports and discovered none of these agencies who use Google Analytics realized that all their Google Analytics data was automatically going back to the U.S. and was being stored in a scattered manner across randomly selected Google data centers. In fact, many admitted they "did not know much" about the software they were using on their web sites, or even how their web sites were constructed - never mind knowing any details about the back-end or server side operations.
The article linked above notes that the European Court of Justice has ruled (in several cases) that IP addresses can be used to identify individuals, that IP addresses are "personal data" in certain circumstances and the collection and further processing of IP addresses will be subject to EU data protection law, creating potential compliance difficulties for businesses. But few in these government agencies were aware of that. But then again they did not know all this data was winging its way back to the U.S. so their apologies accepted :-)
Can Google Analytics be made "GDPR compliant"? Well, yes. Kind of. But it's complex. We spoke to a few IT folks who said you need to fiddle with a lot of Google tools and features like customizable cookie settings, data sharing settings, privacy controls, data retention/deletion controls, IP anonymization ... oh, a bunch of things. And, no, none of the Swedish agencies noted in the local news articles had any kind of data controls installed.
Or better yet, screw the fiddling around. Just delete it. Easier.
NOTE: much has been made about Google's plans to phase out the practice of letting companies track users across the web using cookies. This is the state of the privacy debate: Google can own over half of the digital advertising market, cut its direct rival off at the knees, and receive widespread praise for having done so, even as users give out less personally identifiable information in exchange but will actually be more easily profiled. This crosses all of our silos: advertising/digital media, cyber security, and eDiscovery/data privacy. In about two weeks time BONG! will have an in-depth piece, one of several such pieces this year on different topics.
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Now, here's a few enlightened selections from Jonathan's stroll and our stroll through the social media garden this past week:
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Enterprise Classification: Minimizing the Impact of Data Breaches
Greg Buckles
eDiscovery Journal
When addressing cybersecurity, most eDiscovery providers talk in glittering generalities - not in terms of specifics areas of concern (pain points). Nobody goes into detail of what that security looks like and its applicability in different environments and geographies. We've spent 20+ years meeting with vendors in the cybersecurity industry, and reporting on the industry. We know the vendors and the experts who really know their stuff.
That's why Greg Buckles is a cut above the rest in the eDiscovery industry. He says straight out "I am not a security or privacy expert" but we've read and tracked him for years and we agree with his self-assessment: he's worked over the decades building mature information governance and eDiscovery lifecycles.
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E-Discovery Expertise Paved a Path to Partnership for This Big Law Attorney
Manfred Gabriel
Holland & Knight LLP
Scan just about any legal news blog site (or most personal legal bloggers) and you'll read ad nauseam about a lawyers’ ethical duty to be competent in technology, the need to be competent in tech to survive, etc. And you'll find counter arguments from lawyers who say "I barely have time to keep up with my subject matter expertise, never mind tech. And what will it really gain me?"
Hmmm. How about making partnership , if you're really good at tech?
The following story is pretty cool. As Manfred Gabriel notes, he certainly had no expectation of making partner from his perch as its head of legal support services. His job was simply to oversee the firm's e-discovery and fact-finding unit. And some aspects of the firm's innovation and technology-driven solutions. While he did represent clients, his main role was "operational". And then ... BANG!
To read Gabriel's story click on the following link:
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Wiring the mind of the digital law department
Dan Reed
UnitedLex
Digital transformation ain't easy. It takes a real business mind set. Yes, Big Law is a business (just like Home Base or Home Depot or Krispy Kreme Donuts or Fnac or Ikea) but the real business mindset is not there. Study after study shows how unprepared the legal industry was for digital consumers. It (partly) explains why the Big Four easily crossed the digital divide to capture such a large market share of legal business through their legal divisions. The C-Suite increasingly expects in-house counsel to radically respond to the business and deeply understand the complex issues the enterprise is facing from multiple facets.
But not all corporate law departments "get it". In this piece Dan Reed explains why "digital is a mindset". As he notes, digital is a new way of doing business. You have to "create new pathways in the hive mind of your entire department".
It's an excellent piece that explains how to start to "wire the mind of the digital law department". You can read it by clicking on the following link: the-bong-weekend.report/wiring
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It’s not the law firm associates who want to go back to the office - it’s the partners
Nina Carducci
Project Counsel Media
And speaking of Krispy Kreme Donuts and law firm business mindsets, remote working turned out to be very, very profitable for the top U.S. law firms last year ... because every firm was doing it. Clients had loads of legal work to hand out (eDiscovery and legaltech work has been overflowing) and they had no choice but to select a firm where all the lawyers were working from their kitchens.
Ah. But once governments allow a widespread return to offices, law firms will then be able to compete for work based on whether their lawyers are collaborating in person. We've already heard about the demand for lawyers "in their seats". Staff attorneys at two different Big Law firms told us how their firms won pitches because they met the clients in person and promised to have lawyers back into the office to work on the matters. For the other lawyers who Zoomed in to make their pitch they were unsuccessful. Homeworking no longer looks financially savvy. For our full story click on the link: https://the-bong-weekend.report/return-to-the-office
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Redesigning the Laptop for a Work-From-Home Era
Eric De Grasse
Project Counsel Media
And continuing with our work-from-home stories ....
Last year most of us were deep into a wave of “new productivity” software – dozens of new companies were out there trying to remix some combination of lists, tables, charts, tasks, notes, and light-weight databases with collaboration, chat and sharing. All of these things are unbundling and rebundling spreadsheets, email and file shares. Instead of a flat grid of cells and a dumb list of files and messages, we get some kind of richer canvas that mixes all of these together in ways that are native to the web and collaboration.
And of course, we added video. We will look back at 2020 as the year of maximum screen time. Severed by the pandemic from face-to-face interactions, we have been chained to our devices, making more video and watching more video than ever before. This ubiquity of moving images – this videocracy that first took shape during the early 2000s, with the rise of data-connected phones, Facebook, and YouTube – has become the chief way many of us view the world. Most of us were using our laptops which seemed chained to camera technology 2-3 years old.
But help is on the way. Apple, which developed AR trickery to “correct” the eyeline on FaceTime calls, is working on even better tweaks so that upcoming editions of the MacBook Pro will have the camera sophistication of your iPhone 12 Pro. For instance, it is improving the lighting on the person you are calling. Many times on Zoom chats or video interviews the host/interviewer always has better lighting because she/he has better equipment. Apple wants to compensate for that through AR to “correct” everybody’s lighting. Tweaks like this, minor as they might be, will help make video calls even more immersive and make it more like you’re having an everyday chat with a person.
Dan Weil, technology editor for the Wall Street Journal, has been running some video events and interviews with digital media mavens. It's all behind the Journal's pay wall but we got permission to post a summary. You can read it by clicking this link:
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The UK is secretly testing a controversial web snooping tool
Matt Burgess
Wired Magazine
If you read the general policy statements on the UK Information Commissioner's website he's doing everything he can to "restrict the improper processing of your personal information". But then there's that pesky Investigatory Powers Act of 2016 (dubbed the Snooper’s Charter) which involves the creation of Internet Connection Records, or ICRs. These are records of what you do online and have a broad definition.
So it seems under the guise of that Snooper Charter police and internet companies across the UK have been quietly building and testing surveillance technology (over at least the last two years but analysts say it has been going on longer) that log and store the web browsing of every single person in the UK. Heather Burns, policy manager at the Open Rights Group, a UK-based privacy and internet freedom organisation, says the operation requires internet service providers to “collect the haystack in order to identify two needles”. She adds that it is unclear what data was collected by the trial, whether what was collected in practice went beyond the scope of the trial, or any of its specifics: “This is a fairly staggering lack of transparency around mass data collection and retention". To read the article click on this link:
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The New Era of Social Media Isn't About Feeds
Will Oremus
OneZero
Social media platforms are, perhaps regrettably, not going anywhere. And we'll guess you're like us: there can be an awful lot of content to consume. We spent over one-half of our time in the advertising/digital media industries and so we subscribe to about 90 social platforms and feeds (the "Usual Suspects" plus a boatload of Substacks and a number of very defined industry platforms). And, yeah: lots of time on TikTok and Clubhouse.
For our eDiscovery clients it's more data collection issues, and for our cybersecurity clients it's the vulnerabilities of these platforms. But let's take a wider scope which is something we will be doing with BONG! each week.
These platforms continue to evolve, as noted in this article, and will be boons ... and headaches, no doubt ... for everybody. We have grown used to scrolling through our social media feeds, and advertisers have grown used to meeting us there. As Will Oremus observes:
"But while these feeds may be addictive, they're also exhausting and numbing. When every post in your feed has been selected from a huge pool of possible posts for its attention-grabbing qualities, you can start to feel shouted at, manipulated, pandered to, and overwhelmed. Over time, it might dawn on you that the feed's value to your life is less than the sum of its posts. Not to mention, the value to society of bombarding everyone with attention bait from all sides is, let's say, mixed at best. I think that's part of why we're starting to see a new crop of platforms that operate according to a different logic — a logic of loyalty, intentionality, and deliberate payment (whether of attention or money). The Pattern: New digital media products are focusing on low-volume, high-attention relationships rather than high-volume, low-attention feeds."
Oremus takes a look at some new and upcoming products and features that point in this new direction. For example, Twitter plans to launch Communities, which will form groups around common interests. There is also Super Follows, also from Twitter, which suggests a monetization alternative to advertising—the feature will allow users to charge for "premium" tweets or other content. We agree with Oremus that this might be a profitable avenue for celebrities, less so for journalists. See the write-up for more examples.
Whatever specific ideas sink or swim, this tinkering indicates a new direction for social media—more deliberate user choices and less aimless scrolling through whatever an algorithm sends our way. This sounds like a welcome shift, but will it be enough to combat filter bubbles and fake news?
It's worth your time. Here's the link:
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JONATHAN MAAS' MOMENT OF ZEN

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[ Something a little off-beat that Jonathan finds each week, either a video or photo ]

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Before charts on the internet were a thing (well, before the internet was a thing), the Central Electricity Generating Board in Manchester, England mapped electricity usage using three-dimensional physical charts. Those were the days.
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ENDNOTE
Where the name BONG! comes from, as explained by Jonathan:

For those outside the UK (or in the UK but without televisions), BONG! is a reference to the main evening TV news in the UK, on which headlines are read out between strikes (bongs) of the now-silent Big Ben, the bell in the Elizabeth Tower (renamed from the Clock Tower in honour of the Queen's Diamond Jubilee) at the Palace of Westminster. You can thank a particularly persistent pedant early on in the life of my BONG! for this rather precise explanation.
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If you .....
• have comments on this issue (suggestions for improvements, topics you'd like to see covered)
• are not subscribed to our newsletter and want to be
• want to learn about content contribution and sponsorship opportunities, or promote your event or webinar
... then just pop us an email: Catarina Conti operations@infotecheurope.com
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