Obama's Privacy Bill of Rights: Just a Beginning

jfruh writes "Last night the White House hastily arranged a phone conference at which a 'Privacy Bill of Rights' was announced. It's an important document, not least because it affirms the idea that our data belongs to us, not to companies that happen to collect it. But it has a number of shortcomings, not least among them the companies aren't required to respect the rules laid out."

Comments

aren't required to respect the rules?

[CannonballHead]

So this is a Privacy Bill of Suggestions :)

Re:aren't required to respect the rules?

[girlintraining]

Privacy Bill of Suggestions

In this country, that's progress. However, we are still woefully lacking compared to the EU, where privacy is taken very seriously and most industries are required to disclose any and all personal data held and delete it upon request. And I'm not talking the "We just hid it from our homepage" delete either, but a bona fide "We don't have it anymore, anywhere, and if we do we could be sued for a very large amount of money."

It's stuff like this that has firmly convinced me that while the US might have been the origination point of the internet, it is no longer a leader, or even in the race, when it comes to either innovation or culture. My country's only political agenda is its GDP. It will do so even if it means feeding its own citizens to the wolves in the process... Anything to make a buck.

Re:aren't required to respect the rules?

[icebike]

But he can unilaterally order the NSA to stop scanning phone calls and email and text messages and tweets.

Half the crap the private companies collect are at the behest of the government.
Everyone wants to blame Bush, but Bush's America was under attack. That was then. This is now. But Obama's America is still saddled with all the things Bush put in place and all the additions Obama put in place, and nothing has been scaled back.

I haven't been that impressed ...

[therealkevinkretz]

... with how his Administration (or the previous one, before you partisan bedwetters get all bunched up) has treated the *actual* Bill of Rights. So I don't have much hope for its respecting the goals of this one.

Let me know when...

[Anonymous Coward]

Mr. President,

Please let me know when you plan on respecting our privacy rights w/r/t warrant-less wiretaps and data-mining of personal information of American citizens by the NSA, FBI, and etc.

Otherwise your so-called "Privacy Bill of Rights" is just a shallow gimmick designed to score brownie points from the less informed and less attentive among us in the electorate.

Re:I'm more worried about YOU

[Sponge Bath]

...asking my doctor how long my dick is without at least a court order?

Most women would appreciate the government staying out of their vaginas as well. Unlike your joke about penis size, they have real intrusions to complain about on the privacy front.

We DON'T need yet ANOTHER "Bill of Rights"!

[Anonymous Coward]

First, every website had to have its own "Privacy Policy."

Now, we need a federally-mandated one?

Anyway--a quick search reveals numerous existing "Bill of Rights," for example:

Voter's Bill of Rights
Patient's Bill of Rights
Donor Bill of Rights
Academic Bill of Rights
Landowners Bill of Rights
Taxicab Rider Bill of Rights (NYC; Ha! Figures!)
The eBook User's Bill of Rights
Visual Effects Industry Bill of Rights
Merchant Bill of Rights
Campus Sexual Assault Victims' Bill of Rights

* Stop calling anything but our original Bill of Rights a "Bill of Rights" -- to do so is to diminish its significance and uniqueness

* With so many "Bills of Rights," collectively they mean little--just like so many "Privacy Policies"

You can't just "keep it secret"

[F69631]

The era of massive data mining is beginning. http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/ And that's just your groceries, not your online behavior, which likely contains a lot more hidden clues.

When companies can decide to track and analyze your behavior in any way they want to, reasonably accurately predict things such as pregnancies, marriages, divorces, etc., and use it to their advantage, intentionally disguising all this from you... it's borderline absurd to say "people should just keep their secrets secret".

It's true that it's arguable whether this sort of behavior should be regulated (It's not "evil" that they just look what you've bought and try to predict your interests based on that) and if we decide to regulate it, we'll face a lot of problems... But it's quite odd to say that there shouldn't be a lot of public discourse around this subject (It's relevant to a lot of people and we already have some laws about ethical advertising and for a good reason) and just silly to say that people should take personal responsibility about how data miners figure out things they've never told anyone.

Bills of rights stop the government.

[Karmashock]

That's the whole point of rights. All the rights in the bill of rights are negative rights. They don't tell people they can do stuff they say the government can't stop them doing it.

So for example, the freedom of speech doesn't say I can stand on a soap box and sing show tunes backwards. It says the government can't stop me from doing that.

It doesn't stay you can have a religion or beliefs. It says the government can't stop you from having them.

So on and so forth. They're more about restraining the government.

So... Is that what Obama has done here? Has he said the government can't do certain things? Because I rather doubt it. And if he hasn't then he's not offering anyone rights so much as putting additional regulations on ISPs. That isn't a right. If he wants to give me a right then he can agree the government will leave the internet alone.

Data ownership

[Dave Emami]

... our data belongs to us, not to companies that happen to collect it.

I know I'm in the minority on this, but I disagree with the underlying assumption that data belongs to you by virtue of being about you. Take it down to the simplest level: Adam sees Bob crossing the street. "Bob crossed the street" is the data, an observation that belongs to Adam (the observer) not Bob (the observed), by virtue of now residing in Adam's brain, which belongs to him, not to Bob. Everything else is just communication, storage, analysis, and technological assistance. It comes back to this fundamental point once you remove the obfuscating details, and Bob doesn't acquire the right to perform a partial lobotomy on Adam just because he doesn't like what or how much Adam knows about him, or whom Adam might tell, or what decisions Adam might make based on what he knows.

This assumes, of course, that Adam didn't violate Bob's rights in order to make these observations -- he didn't trespass by breaking into Bob's house, for instance.