Who owns the data produced from cardiac monitoring devices? The devices are proliferating as vendors make them ever smaller, improving patient comfort and care for heart disorders.

The General Services Administration is phasing out the Apps.gov portal. GSA spokeswoman Jackie Stewart confirmed the decision today as part of the agency's efforts to streamline delivery of its services. "All of the services listed on Apps.gov will still be available on GSA Advantage at www.gsaadvantage.gov, and agencies can access free social media applications at www.howto.gov," Stewart said in an email to Federal News Radio. "Simplifying these customer-facing websites is a testament to GSA's commitment to being responsive to our customers and to promoting effective and efficient government."

More than half of federal information workers use their personal smartphones for work purposes, even though agencies have not fully fleshed out their BYOD or “bring your own device" policies, according to a new report by Forrester Research and Cisco.

As the federal government presses ahead with an array of initiatives to cut costs and improve efficiencies throughout its sprawling IT apparatus, agency staff who oversee enterprise architecture must work to align their efforts with the business objectives of their organizations, a panel of federal IT leaders said at a government technology conference yesterday.

The Federal Risk Authorization Management Program, or FedRAMP, is still in the early stages of implementation. In order to address common questions on the process, General Services Administration officials fielded inquiries from industry and agency IT shops during a Nov. 7 DigitalGov University webinar.

The National Archives and Records Administration awarded technology company Unisys Corporation a contract worth up to $7.2 million to oversee the transition of the agency's 4,500 users to the cloud-based Google Apps for email and collaboration.

In 2007, Robert M. Nelson, an astronomer, and 27 other scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory sued NASA arguing that the space agency’s background checks of employees of government contractors were unnecessarily invasive and violated their privacy rights.

The General Services Administration has released a new online tool to help agencies analyze their spending, IT planning, and past performances on governmentwide acquisition contracts.

Both Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google were keen to get on the framework for the second iteration of the government’s G-Cloud platform, but were ultimately denied, TechWeekEurope has learned. It had been unclear whether Amazon and Google simply didn’t want a piece of the G-Cloud pie or whether they were shunned by the government. The suppliers may also have been unimpressed by the terms offered by the G-Cloud.

I attended the recent Europe Data Protection Congress in Brussels hosted by the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP). After three days of attending sessions, listening to some of the best-known European experts speak about data protection and privacy, and talking to dozens of other attendees, I walked away with one very clear observation: European data protection interests are on a collision course with the current business models of companies such as Facebook and Google which rely on personal data to thrive.