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NSA Revelation Leads FTC To Propose "Reclaim Your Name" Initiative

Posted by timothy on from the agency-vs.-agency-vs.-reality dept.

First time accepted submitter clegrand writes "Julie Brill, a member of the Federal trade Commission, has proposed a voluntary big data industry initiative to allow consumers access to their personal records and the ability to correct them. She has coined it 'Reclaim Your Name.' While some big data companies such as Acxiom already allow such access, it is not an industry-wide practice. She sees this campaign as a natural extension of the Fair Credit Reporting Act and a logical partner for the ongoing effort of the Do Not Track mechanism currently under standardization review with the W3C."

5 of 82 comments (clear)

  1. Data Verification by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Yes, they wouldn't want to be keeping inaccurate dossiers on you. Why with your cooperation there is no limit to what they can know about you. Terrorism will be a thing of the past. So of course that means that we can repeal the various Patriot type acts that the western world has been going gonzo over for the past decade.

    1. Re:Data Verification by Jane+Q.+Public · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Exactly.

      If Ms. FTC wants to impress me, she can propose that we have access to that material and the ability to remove it, not to change it.

      I wouldn't want to change it. If some asshole screws me over because they were using faulty data, I might have a chance to sue. If I did their work for them and corrected their information, I'd pretty much be waiving any right I might have if they then used it against me somehow.

  2. Re:Good luck with that by Trepidity · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Yeah, from their perspective individual inaccuracies aren't a huge deal. The only kind of inaccuracies that particularly matter to them are systemic ones that their actual customers, banks and lenders, care about. So e.g. if they were flagging large groups of would've-been-profitable folks or not flagging large groups of deadbeats, they might try to tweak their data-collection or score formula to reduce the rate of those false-positives or false-negatives. But that's all at a macro-level: much like Google, they don't care to resolve individual mistakes in a case-by-case manner.

    --
    10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
  3. Re:Isn't this what the free market advocates claim by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Otherwise known as the "Fuck you, got mine" philosophy of political thought.

  4. Re:Isn't this what the free market advocates claim by LordLimecat · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The most commonly ignored factor in most theories is human nature.