On Several Fronts, US Gov't Prepares To Regulate Online Privacy

storagedude writes "There are at least five US government efforts underway to regulate data and online privacy, according to a new US government internet policy official, who sees some kind of privacy regulation as likely. Ari Schwartz, who left the Center for Democracy and Technology two months ago to become senior internet policy advisor at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, says issues like Facebook's never-ending privacy concerns are making some kind of a national law or regulation more and more likely. He thinks segregating identity from data isn't enough; the data must then be aggregated after identity is stripped out. He also called for objective measures of privacy compliance."

Comments

It's a little bloody late for that.

[bmo]

The EU and the Brits figured this out long ago. The British data protection act is a model of privacy protection that we should have emulated. But that was in the day that the world wide wibbley web was still very immature and back when moneyed interests weren't as powerful. Now there's so much inertia for data mining the web that this will never see the light of day outside any Senate or House committee.

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BMO

Re:It's a little bloody late for that.

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

The British data protection act is a model of privacy protection that we should have emulated.

Actually, the DPA offers fairly poor privacy protection. It doesn't require opt-in before tracking personal data, for example, nor does it give you any right to demand that personal data held about you be removed from a system as long as that data is actually correct. In fact, it doesn't really offer any privacy guarantee at all in the traditional sense; we rely more on the provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights for such privacy protection as we do have.

The real problem we have today is that in a world with massive databases, fast and cheap communications via the Internet, etc., traditional privacy standards don't actually protect the things they used to in any meaningful way. We need to consider why privacy is important, and establish social and legal norms that protect what matters, instead of trying to somehow adapt ideas that are decades out of date as if they are still going to protect individuals from abuse by larger and more powerful organisations today.

Re:Stand by...

[jbonomi]

The US government is sufficiently large that there isn't a single entity which can be called "the government". One part may well be genuinely interested in protecting privacy, while another part is doing its best to have the Fourth Amendment repealed. Schizophrenic? Oh yes.

Hey! That's not what schizophrenic means! You should instead have said "Does the US government appear to have dissociative identity disorder? Oh yes."