The White House is working on a proposal for an American GDPR. Over the past month, the Commerce Department has met with representatives of over 80 companies, trade associations, and consumer groups.

The government’s goal is to release an initial set of ideas this fall that outlines Web users’ rights, including general principles for how companies should collect and handle consumers’ private information, the people said. The forthcoming blueprint could then become the basis for Congress to write the country’s first wide-ranging online-privacy law, an idea the White House recently has said it could endorse.

A spokesperson for President Trump said that the administration wanted to achieve «the appropriate balance between privacy and prosperity.» Here’s the Orr Translation: Corporations will continue to erode our privacy with Trump’s blessing.

Scooters are apparently a fad again with middle schoolers. Scooter startups are getting VC cash and attention from big companies like Alphabet. The smart scooters are also tracking your kids and selling their data.

A new blog post from the organization’s Northern California branch analyzes all of the data-collection practices of Spin, Bird, and Lime. To put it mildly, these companies’ policies all seem a bit reckless. For example, all three startups have persistent user tracking, meaning they are following users’ every move from the time they use the scooter until the end of the session. As the ACLU writes, this means it will know if you’re going to a “political protest, or to a religious service, or to see a medical specialist.” And, of course, these companies are keeping this data for an undisclosed amount of time while reserving the right to share it with third parties.

I’ve been interested in ReGen villages for a couple years now. It’s a high-tech, eco-friendly village located in the Netherlands. Vertical farms will provide food, food waste is turned into fish food for local aquaculture, houses filter rainwater, and there’s a village OS platform that uses AI to manage various systems.

The neighborhood works differently than most. Because of the expected arrival of self-driving cars in coming years, and to encourage walking and biking, the houses aren’t designed with parking; a new bus line along the edge of the neighborhood, with a dedicated bus lane, can take residents to the town of Almere or into Amsterdam.

It sounds like a great place to live, and projects like this should be a model for the future. More sustainability and more environmentally-friendly designs.