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Obama May Toughen Internet Privacy Rules
CWmike writes "The Obama administration is considering plans to step up policing of Internet privacy issues and to establish a new position to direct the effort, reports the WSJ, which cites unnamed sources. Any push for stronger federal oversight over online privacy is likely to be welcomed by privacy advocates increasingly concerned about the data-collection and data-sharing practices of big Internet and marketing companies. High profile cases such as the uproar over Facebook's personal data collection habits and the public reaction to Google's continuing problems over its Street View Wi-Fi snooping have created a broader awareness of online privacy issues. The big question, though, is just how successful any fresh attempt at enforcing new privacy strictures on the Internet will be with Republicans soon to be in charge of the House."
The big question, though, is just how successful any fresh attempt at enforcing new privacy strictures on the Internet will be with Republicans soon to be in charge of the House.
Let's try not to be so blatant with our biases next time.
Okay. I think I'm done. I'm going to terminate my traffic, all of it, via VPN in some other country.
he did his commitments to government transparency and an end to partisan politics as usual.
bullshit.
"The big question, though, is just how successful any fresh attempt at enforcing new privacy strictures on the Internet will be with Republicans soon to be in charge of the House."
The Democrats have proven themselves to be just as guilty in this regard so please refrain from the partisianship.
Typical knee jerk reaction from the over-reaching government. What they should do, instead, is do a public service program to educate people on what the potential problems with the loss of or inappropriate use of their personal information is. Then allow the consumer to decide what to do about the problem themselves. Perhaps they care about the issue and will avoid sites that abuse their personal information. Or perhaps they don't care and will not waste their time on the issue. Either way this is bound to be tangibly and intangibly cheaper for the general populace than additional control exerted by the government.
I'm all for more privacy, but all this means is the NSA and those other three letter agencies have decided it's easier to snoop on us without asking Facebook and others simply hand over the data they need.
Great. Now where did I put that tinfoil hat...
that the big internet and marketing companies will be writing the legislation. Bye bye, net neutrality.
He might try, but the republicans will block it.
Technoli
The gradual transfer of power to our benevolent masters begins.
I don't have to do business with google. I don't have to run their scripts or whitelist their servers. I don't have to unblock doubleclick.
I don't have to to business with facebook.
That's the difference between privacy industry and the government.
Once the govt gets its claws on the *content* of the internet, it's never letting go, not ever, and it's only going to grab more and more in wee little bites that each are not very big and are each very reasonable. I mean who could argue against protecting our privacy? Or keeping the children safe? Or catching terrorists?
Yes, it's great that DARPA funded the net from the beginning. But I don't think we want the government in the "content regulation" business.
From the evil data-mining corporations out for our private data.
Still no word on whether or not we will be saved from a prying government with increased authority over internet communication and encryption.
How does it feel to be a liar with pants constantly on fire?
I support measures to increase privacy, but not government enforcement or government decided rules. We need SMALLER federal government, not bigger.
Right now, when your privacy is violated, they say "My bad" and keep on going. We need a law that says something like: 1. For violating all non-medical, non-sexual privacy, (revealing Social Security information, bank account information, phone numbers, etc.) each incident costs the violater $100 fine per person 2. For violating medical privacy, each incident costs the violater $800 fine per person 3. For violating sexual privacy, each incident costs the violater $5,000 fine per person Having the fines go to the EFF (to avoid spurious lawsuits) This would be in addition to the legal right to sue for damages.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Is this not the typical reaction by the average idiot American? Let government legislate a cure to our problem? Are we not supposed to be a free market? When will we say as a group, we refuse to use facebook, or any other site for that matter, until they provide agreements that protect our private data? Instead we just give corporations everything we have so THEY can make money off YOU, and your only concern is why is the government not doing anything about it?
The Government's track record leaves little for debate. The standard is to over charge taxpayers for a system with loop holes that only result in the public "feeling better" without actually solving the real problem. Ladies and Gentlemen, do you want your privacy? Then stop giving it away like retarded little tripe's without a care in the world while expecting the government to swoop in and rescue you like a mythical Superman. If you have not been paying any attention the government does not care about your privacy when it concerns them. They want to be able to stop, search, and seize you and your property any time they please regardless of the constitution. If you think they really care about your privacy, I have some top quality products I would like to sell you! A fool and their money as well as their liberty are soon parted!
Can we please stop calling Google's Wifi drive-by data collection a "Privacy violation" - they only collected traffic that was publicly available because people chose to transmit it. If anything, it was good for public awareness, hopefully at least a few people encrypted their Wifi traffic because of it.
It's not like Google put the data up on their search engine, it was an artifact of the collection process leftover on corporate hard drives.
While it's nice to see lawmakers taking an interest in privacy, rather than go after Google, they should be going after the manufacturers that still sell access points that default to unencrypted traffic.
The danger that all of these people who had their data snooped face is not from Google -- it's not like Google is going to use their credit cards or try to steal their identity. The real danger is in having their data snooped by people with criminal intent.
this means he'll "toughen" internet privacy by giving all of your data to spammers and identity thieves to "protect." After all, your data can't be stolen if it's already been given away.
republicans have different opinions than democrats
This is somewhat of a stretch. From what I can tell, almost all democrats and almost all republicans equally hold the opinion that they should get as much money from lobbyists as possible. So the real difference is in which monied interests have them in their pocket.
I am still amazed that people just keep voting for "the other side" over and over, then being shocked when the new/old guard turns out to be just as corrupt and awful as the old/new guard.
Will we never learn that the only way to have real governance is to have governance without politicians?
The same government who gave the telcos a pass for illegal wire taps
the same government who promised transparency "all the debates will be on C-Span!"....
the same government who likes looking at naked pictures of aunt sally at the airports...
Yeah, thats who i want providing me privacy.....
It takes two parties to engage in bipartisan politics. What you're suggesting is just complete asinine rubbish. The President went way out of his way to include the GOP in the process, and they opted to shut things down anyways. By design he doesn't have any good ways of forcing the opposition party to do it's part to do things in a bipartisan fashion.
While I agree in principle with the idea that privacy is generally a good thing...
I'm far more worried about government intrusion into my life as opposed to Facebook knowing I'm a fan of the McRib. Facebook has no ability to project military or even police power, whereas the government - at the rate it's going lately - will in ten years send agents to pick me up because I refuse to give into the legislated health NannyGestapo(tm).
YOU CAN HAVE MY BACON WHEN YOU PRY IT FROM MY COLD DEAD FINGERS, DO Y'HEAR ME?
The real problem is not Facebook selling targeted ads, but government "security letters" allowing them to snoop into your life from all kinds of sources without any judicial oversight and without ever telling you. I don't expect Obama will address any of that.
While I agree with your overall point, I'd like to take this moment to point out how awesome it is that C-SPAN 1, 2, and 3 exist. Being given a direct line-of-sight into our legislative process is rad as hell, especially when compared to the secretive inner workings of many other governments around the world.
The people that call-in during the morning show on C-SPAN Radio commonly say "Thank you for C-SPAN". There's a damn good reason for that.
Living With a Nerd
I support measures to increase privacy, but not government enforcement or government decided rules. We need SMALLER federal government, not bigger.
So how do you propose that we implement such measures?
What privacy?
Everything is intercepted.
Yours In Novosibirsk,
K. Trout
How about we start with "no more warrantless wiretaps" and by having the Executive Branch's own agencies reversing their insistence that America's telecom infrastructure be inherently snoopable by the spooks?
So, that's nice that the government wants to crack down on sites like Facebook, but I think there are data mining things going on that most folk (even some on slashdot) are unaware of. For instance, awhile back I decided to switch my car insurance policy from company A to company B. When I contacted company B and had them quote me a rate, they said there was an at-fault accident on my record that shouldn't have been there. I asked them where they got that information because my DMV record was clean. They explained that they got their info. from a third party company that gets that kind of information from DMV. They told me I could contact the company to have the accident removed from my record, as there seemed to be no problem with the insurance company disputing the alleged incident (in other words, I am not paying for the accident). Well, I did some Googling and internet browsing and found the company. They list themselves as a data aggregation company (one that I had never heard of) that will sell information to any party interested (information like my personal driving record). There was a whole process you could go through to "opt-out" of their aggregation service, effectively limiting them from collecting information on you. I started the process which involved a few forms asking for personal information. Not wanting to give this company much more information, I just decided to call them instead.
I talked to a customer service rep. and they helped me get though the opt-out process without giving up much more in the way of personal info. The rep. quipped, however, that my efforts were pretty futile because there were countless other companies providing the same services. So I asked for those company names and, sure enough, eventually found their web presence with similar business-descriptions and opt-out policies. All of this data aggregation was happening unbeknown to myself and probably most folk that are not in the car insurance industry. Many of them had outdated records (they only mine DMV so often), and showed various false information about my driving record in their records. This was the info. that would be used to analyze my driving habits for insurance rates. All in all, it was breathtaking how flawed and vast this info. gathering network was.
So, long story short, the privacy thing goes a lot deeper than Facebook. Frankly, I have a Facebook profile and I couldn't give a damn about my privacy settings on there (I never want to work for someone that takes things I say on a site like Facebook seriously). What I do give a damn about is companies that turn a profit off of data-mining me without my permission (I NEVER requested any of these company's services, why the hell do they have the right to gather a profile on me?)
Anyways, I would much prefer to see legislation regarding issues like mine rather than crap directed at Facebook or Google. Either way, it was a few months back that I went through all of this and I forget the name of the first company I contacted. I think I still have it written on a post-it note at home. I'll try to find it and dig it up to post in a response to this message later.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
All these calls around privacy, protection of user data. They are all going to fall in the end.
That is because the young neither know nor care about privacy. The next generation will grow up in a world where pretty much no-one cares who reads what they post. People here worry all the time about employers freaking out when they see random things you've posted on the internet (hence the attempt at regulations that let you wipe a slate clean) but future employers will not care, because they too will have grown up in a world where privacy didn't really matter, and will simply filter out a persons public persona from the work persona (which is already very different for most people anyway, it's just not as obvious now).
So even if you try to regulate all of this it will not work, because when the people posting care nothing about privacy and the people building things care little about privacy, there is little you can do to stop the flood of privacy-stripping output that results.
As with everything there will be some negative side effects, but the world moves on with most people getting by just fine.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Actually, where I live, the collection of personal information is regulated by law, and Google is/was in flagrant violation of that law. It doesn't matter that the data was available in the clear, over the air : personal data is protected by law, and hand-waving excuses about technical errors or artifacts of collection process are irrelevant. I realise that the US has no proper privacy laws, but many other places (and all other industrialised nations) do have such legislation. Google simply ignored those laws, which is why they were called to task by the Canadian Privacy Commissioner and EU data regulators.
My next sig will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush
The 2 parties have primary goals is to oppose whatever the other proposes...except for going to war !
I have to hand it to the government on this one. They have completely reframed the idea of "privacy" online and separated it from anonymity. We all know that to have true privacy, you have to have anonymity. That aspect of the debate has already been marginalized and will never be addressed. Instead what we are getting is a regulatory regime that proposes to protect our real identities online. What happens if you do not want to use your real identity? It seems like the path that we are going down is to make it more and more difficult not to.
The battle has been lost. We're already in the aftermath; the laws are now being codified to solidify the decisions that have already been made.
It would be nice to see some push back against the government on this. I'm of the opinion that if they want me to be me online, I want a cryptographically secure authentication mechanism. I want two factor RSA. I don't want a single piece of unsolicited email. Unless I have opted in by signing with my digital key, I don't want to hear one peep from advertisers.
If the government is going to get involved, it better go one of two ways. Either A, let me be anonymous or B, make it so damn burdensome for anyone who I don't want to talk to talk to me that they decide it isn't worth the hassle to initiate communication unless I solicit it.
It's a Canadian thing. In Canada, "The House" is the House of Commons--our counterpart to Congress.
Our counterpart to the White House is Rideau Hall, but there the similarity ends with a resounding crash.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
I think the debates themselves are more of the issue in that complaint, seeing as only parties that the two major parties approve are allowed to participate in them. The C-Span issue is an artifact of that, in so much as people assume the only valid debates are those controlled by the CPD and aired on C-Span, thus undermining the separate, third-party debates.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
There's an old saying "Don't steal, the Government hates competition". I suppose we could extend that to "Don't collect personal information , the Government hates competition".
As long as rule 34 isn't touched, it's all cool.
Be seeing you...
Ecept we're not really given a direct line-of-site into the legislative process. We're being given a direct line-of-sight into the dog-and-pony show that masquerades as our legislative process.
The real workings of the legislature happen behind closed doors, on K street and other places where the legislation is actually hammered out.
What we can watch on C-Span is largely circus.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
The state of Massachusetts has a privacy law that basically means encrypt everything from transmission to storage of client data. Generally, I'm against government interference, however, the internet community has failed end users with regard to privacy protection. This law - minus the government and political party exemptions - should be considered nationwide.
For most people, interacting on the internet is a very private thing. We transmit private emails ... without encryption. We post private messages on "friends" pages with an expectation they will not be shared. Sure, the fine print says they can do anything they want with data we provide, but our "expectations" are different.
"The President went way out of his way to include the GOP in the process"
You must be living in a different reality, because the reality I and everyone else experienced was one where Obama routinely uttered phrases like "We won, deal with it!" and "Republicans need to ride in the back." Both you and Mr. Obama must still be chafing at the giant slap-down that the voters just handed you when they said no to your nanny state wet dreams.
don't mind him. he eats sergy brin's shit for breakfast.
The Government has no business being involved in free speech. That includes policing radio, tv, and internet. Not any party. Not any American government. Not ever.
Half of you numbnuts think communism is the way to go. The other half actually work for a living. And few of you grasp the reality. Government filtering is a violation of free speech.
They will put a nice spin on it. Like they always do. The Patriot Act. The Cybersecurity Act of 2009. Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
They get their foot in the door, and they will never take it out. Understand that before you once again use government as a communist crutch for your incompetence. The free market and free speech stops working when a force of infinite resources plays favorites. You don't pay people that violate your privacy. If they do harm, you sue them in court.
Google collected and cracked the data of thousands of wifi hotspots. That is against the law. Is Google being prosecuted by the Government under the existing laws? No? Why is that do you think?
If you put your Rights into the hands of somebody else to protect, you will lose them. Always. Stand up for yourself. Sue their ass if they leak your data. You don't need Obama the Commi Usurper fondling your balls while you do it.
You have your view of the law and the Canadian Privacy Commissioner has hers - I know which one I believe is the more sound. The mere fact that you write of "suing" in your inappropriate analogy shows how little you understand of how the legislation works.
Neither Canada nor the EU are responsible for the ridiculous situation where the US alone among industrialised nations lacks proper privacy legislation. Being ignorant of these matters is no excuse, for either you or google.
My next sig will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush
> Obama and the Democrats reduced the deficit [yahoo.com] by 9% from Bush's devastation,
Not what the quoted article says. The deficit shrank slightly, compared to the unprecedented baseline that Obama and his democrats had created - this is what it says.
> while reducing taxes on 95% of Americans
For a very creative definition of "taxes" and "reduction". My health insurance costs just rose 70%. I am a CS professor, definitely not a top 5% earner. Where are those wonderful "reductions" I am supposed to be enjoying?
> during the recession Bush caused,
Not by far a point of consensus among economists. The housing crisis has roots in Clinton's forced lending policies and Clinton's deregulation of banks. Republicans tried to curb this repeatedly, Democrats successfully resisted every attempt to reign in mortgages that could not be repaid.
> even as they rescued the economy from that devastating recession.
Really? I do not see a rescued economy around me -- do you?
First, this is not about the Internet. It's about the American way of using it.
In other (Western) countries I could write things like "you are completely incompetent", but I can' t write "someone should drive by your house and teach you a lesson".
In the US I can write "Dr. Joe performs abortion and lives in 400 Main. To bad, if something would happen to him" but I can' t write something, some company's lawyer won' t like (well, I can if I have the money).
In other countries, companies are limited by law to what extent and what kind of information they can keep about me. Companies that do, have to provide that information to me.
In the US, I can't publish internal information about companies, but they can collect and sell anything they want about me. If I want to see what they have on me, I have to pay for that. (In at least half of the states I pay for the privilege to correct a false credit score).
Will Obama fix that? Probably not. Partly because he really isn't that radical, when it comes to change. Partly because, as soon as he starts talking about protecting privacy, some corporation shills will rephrase it to "limiting freedom" (of corporations), "regulating free speech" (of corporate persons), "taking away our rights" (for corporations to treat private information as they please and to not be accountable for anything).
Barak Hussain Obama, the disparaged God, will through Executive Order, Ordain the Kilihg of U.S. Citizens who in he finds ,,, "displeasure".
Old Southern Joke ... "When Grandma farts ... we kill the dog."
T
they won't share with the government.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Everyone in the world is welcome to participate: http://metagovernment.org/wiki/Participate
It is your analogy that is ludicrous and you continue to cling to it as though it has some relevance. It has none. It is up to Google to follow the law. The law governs the collection, use, retention and disclosure of personal information - just because the data can be readily captured doesn't then make it "fair game" for whatever a third party wants to do with it. I readily concede that "fair game" is precisely the situation in the US - personal infomation is an asset that can be bought and sold like any other - but you should recognise that the rest of the civilised world does not share this lackadaisical approach. It always puzzled me that in the land of the free, there is barely any protection for individuals' privacy.
My next sig will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush
"Unnamed sources" == "I made some shit up"
The Republican party boldly defends the freedom of multinational corporations from all those dirty peasants, but because you hate America and want the terrorists to win, you want the nannystate to get on our backs and tell us what we can or cannot do. So of course to support your bashing of Real Americans(TM), you spin the facts to make it sound like Republicans would be doing something bad by defending our freedoms.
It's not just "bias", it's blatant spin!
[/ELABORATERIGHTWINGSTRAWMAN]
Everyone here assumes that the Republicans would do this. Why? Because of their track record. We have a Democrat doing the opposite, and here you are with a straight face pulling out the old "Democrats are just as bad!" argument.
This is a double fallacy because even if the Democrats are just as bad, this does not excuse the Republicans. The other side of the fallacy is that the Democrats usually aren't just as bad when arguments of this sort are used, and this instance is no different.
Yes, it's true that a lot of Democrats are more beholden to corporate interests than the interests of we mere peasants, but you have to be more than a little out of touch with reality to imply that the Democrats are "just as bad" as Republicans in this regard.
Once on the internet you forfeit your privacy imo
People like you will end up giving away our freedoms in the name of 'fairness'. America was never meant to be safe and never meant to be fair. It was meant to be free. Coddled children like you wouldn't get that.
How does it feel to be a liar with pants constantly on fire?
The Head of the TSA, aka Terrorism Service Agnecy, must be captured, schackled, and rendered to answer to Crimes Against Humanity.
Lets put them in Gitmo!
There they can be "Interogated -- butt fucked" 24/7.
And it will be all taped for George W. Bush to watch and masterbate.
Kill'm all.
Kill'm Dano.
[Dano] I've got the shot.