Wrangling Over Proposed Privacy Laws Continues

zurab writes "USA Today reports several U.S. lawmakers introduced a long-awaited privacy bill Wednesday that would allow U.S. businesses to share information about customers who have not explicitly forbidden them to do so. And one of the supporters of this bill - the beloved Mr. Boucher."

Comments

Privacy and personal information...

[crc32]

should be property rights held by individuals. This allows a more perfect market, because the information would be more closely protected than this bill provides. As Larry Lessig explains in his book Code, Privacy as a property right allows those who don't care about privacy to get what they want, while those who have considerable concerns to seriously protect themselves. Any other scheme will deny the fact that privacy concerns differ between different segments of society.

Re:Opt out policy

[jsmyth]

You might think this is funny, but the doubleclick opt-out was exactly this. You had to click through several layers, including one page which solely consisted of a rant on how it is actually in your benefit to allow them to track your usage, and then you have to confusingly click to disagree with their policy, get to the last page, which made a tiny little change to a cookie. Would've been much quicker to print the instruction: Change the number in our cookie to OPT-OUT and it'll be fine.

Look what happened to doubleclick...

Real Privacy Legislation

[MartinB]

Compare and contrast that travesty with UK Data Protection Act 1998. To summarise

Anyone processing personal data must comply with the eight enforceable principles of good practice. They say that data must be:

• fairly and lawfully processed;
• processed for limited purposes;
• adequate, relevant and not excessive;
• accurate;
• not kept longer than necessary;
• processed in accordance with the data subject's rights;
• secure;
• not transferred to countries without adequate protection.

Personal data covers both facts and opinions about the individual. It also includes information regarding the intentions of the data controller towards the individual, although in some limited circumstances exemptions will apply. With processing, the definition is far wider than before. For example, it incorporates the concepts of 'obtaining', holding' and 'disclosing'.

The Full explanation of the principles can be found here

(source: http://www.dataprotection.gov.uk/principl.htm)

Note that last point - the US at present does not have 'adequate protection' (ie protection to an equivalent level). This proposed bill takes it further away.

Something else to note - the enforcement of this will only get stricter when the new Data Protection Commissioner takes office.

Re:The rule

[grung0r]

Well, you've hit on the main issue there. I'm sure(at least I hope)that most people do indeed understand that. There is little anyone can do though. The problem being, that almost all politicans are indeed bought to a extent, and if you vote out a bought one, he or she is just replaced by someone who's owned by a diferent set of industrys. Solving this problem will take a sea-change of the general public's outlook on the situation. That is unlikley to happen untill something directly threatens the freedoms the public as a whole hold dear, of which apparently, freedom of speech and freedom of privacy are not.

What's wrong with Opt-out?

[The Monster]

NOBODY in their right mind would EVER opt-in to something like this

I don't get this. If you ask me for information, make no promises about what you're going to do with it,
and I willingly give it to you, what reason do I have to expect that you won't propagate the data?
Isn't one of our Geek Holy Scriptures "Information wants to be free"?

Re:Boucher has it right

[CantGetAUserName]

Or, Store B is a big national or international company, able to operate massive economies of scale. Store A isn't. Store B undercuts Store A until Store A goes out of business, then raises prices to the point where they can make a profit. If competition springs up, repeat, until

a) everybody is discouraged

b) no sane person would provide backing.

Where do I sign....?

[Zandromeda]

So where do I sign up to tell every company that they have no right to share anything about me? How does one put the big red international symbol for "NO WAY IN HELL" on my information?
Does this mean that every company that asks for information from you in any way would have to provide a mechanism for you to explicitly tell them they can't share your information? Does this mean a business can share my information as soon as they get it because I, the little consumer, have to go out on my own and specifically contact someone at the company who gives a rat's ass and tell them they can't share it?

This bill certainly implies there should be a clear way to do this, but we all know that anything a law might imply does hold water, it just becomes another loop hole. I don't think a microscopic check box at the bottom of some long form is going to cut it.

If you people really cared about privacy...

[zaphod]

...you should be fighting against income taxes. There is no bigger threat to privacy that the governemnt knowing where you work, how much you make, who you donate money to, where you invest your money, etc... Isn't that an invasion of privacy? That offends me more than getting a couple of spams a day.

Of course, just the thought eliminating income taxes (versus a consumpion/sales tax only) makes the people at the ACLU or the Center for Democracy and Technology jump out of their skin. So I want to ask people (especially those who lean to the left), "If you care so much about privacy, don't yo uthink we should eliminate income taxes?"