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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."
On the one hand, such legislation would definitely be welcome in this current environment of information free-for-all. We could finally have some benchmark against which we could judge whether companies (and governments!) were properly addressing security and privacy concerns.
On the other hand, it puts an enormous burden on businesses, especially in the still nascent online business sector where we are far from seeing market maturity. Laws like this put a massive damper on technology improvement and force a huge financial penalty against all competitors in this field.
I would give this industry another 5 years before trying to enact a stringent privacy/security statute. That would give the industry enough time to settle down and allow clear leaders to emerge who would then be in a better position to actually implement such measures.
It says PRIVACY not PIRACY.