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NSA Revelation Leads FTC To Propose "Reclaim Your Name" Initiative
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."
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.
Good luck with that. There was an expose' a year or two ago on TV that I watched showing just how futile it is to try and correct ANY wrong negative info in your credit reports with any of the agencies. To the point that many agencies simply didn't do anything at all when you contact them, except send you around in circles (if you are even that lucky).
So you can make all the laws you want, probably won't make a damn bit of difference. Plus, consumers have NO IDEA how many records are being kept about them and shared and aggregated and combined and by whom.
http://www.ambafrance-uk.org/Protection-of-freedoms-in-France
"Voluntary" and "ability to correct them" How about "compulsory" "removal" of my data if I should choose?
. After all, it's in many businesses interests to have accurate information
agreed.
and in individual consumer's interests to correct their own info.
Maybe, maybe not. Depends on their goals. Being obscured would suit some (many?) people just fine. It depends what value people assign to different things.
Libertarian theory says that the free market should have a lot of incentive to correct for bad info.
In a free market environment without corporations (government-granted exemptions from liability) and courts that respected property rights this might very well be true. Are you willing to allow that theory to be tested?
and the invisible hand crew will be saying that the market will correct eventually, and stop trying to hurry it along
I can't name a single libertarian who thinks that the government-corporate collusion that's going on to invade the privacy of US residents (and others) is likely to subside voluntarily. Ask Joseph Nacchio how well it works out if you put the interests of your customers over those of the State. And before you say, "but he did something wrong," realize that the entire purpose of PRISM and its ilk is to make a retrospectable list of crimes and prohibition violations that every American commits. You too.
"The invisible hand" is Smith's market-god but Austrian price-information theory and its compliment, game theory, do provide a testable framework for information dispersal in free markets. That requires investigation of mid-to-late 20th century scholarship, though, not ideas that came two centuries before. And also markets that aren't artificially manipulated, for best effect, though the theory does work when such intrusions are counted as costs and losses.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
What the hell are you talking about?
Libertarianism is a set of related political philosophies that uphold liberty as the highest political end. This includes emphasis on the primacy of individual liberty, political freedom, and voluntary association. It is the antonym to authoritarianism. Libertarians advocate a society with a greatly reduced state or no state at all
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism
Libertarianism is about individual liberty, period. They believe that liberty is a human right, and no public need is great enough to give cause to remove it from the individual. It has absolutely nothing to do with this story. From the Libertarians point of view the FTC and even the credit burrows wouldn't exist, as both limit the liberty of the individual through regulation. Libertarians believe the only laws and regulations that should be created are ones that increase Liberty and prevent authoritarian control of the populace by Government or other citizens. i.e. Murder would be illegal because it obviously takes liberty away from the victim.
Please don't talk shit about political philosophies you clearly know absolutely nothing about.
Everyone should go back and read about what the NSA program has been collecting. There are no dossiers in the programs that have recently come to light; it's metadata, and in some cases raw data. The phone information, for example, is which numbers called which other numbers and for how long. It's not like a credit report where there is derivative information; they go to the database when they want to look up associations between entities. Creating dossiers on hundreds of millions of people at random is hugely wasteful, since (conservatively) 99.9999% of the time it'd be a total waste of time and the person would never be of interest. The NSA isn't dumb when it comes to this stuff, ethical concerns about whether they should be doing it aside.
Your whole premise is based on what has recently come to light. What has most people concerned is what hasn't come to light. I would suppose that the FBI isn't dumb either and yet they kept files on millions of people without strong reason to during Hoover's reign.
You say that creating dossiers on hundreds of millions of peole is hugely wasteful. I would agree, but then again, DASD is cheap and when has the government been known to be frugal in its endeavors, especially when it involves secret operations?
you forget that the justification for collecting the metadata is for filtering for activity which is a cause for collecting more data.
it's for so that they know which data they need to go after if they want person XYZ's data.
but this is more about the problem that corporations in america can do anything with your data, even if inaccurate. you lack the data protection directive which is pretty much what caught many companies including facebook with their pants down in eu.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Suppose that I as a private person collected data about people, did not correct errors, and passed it around to the world as I see fit. If a credit agency can do that and be immune from suits or criminal charges what concept in American law permits a credit bureau to do it? Seems like equal before the law resides in the toilet.
Funny how the bill does not apparently allow suing any data collector for inaccuracies, which might have already impacted somebody's life.
This. The whole idea is to sell it to the public as a "consumer protection" measure, but when the final passes it will actually do more to protect the credit bureaus and other corporations that collect data. Right now you have some ability to sue for damages from a company spreading inaccurate information - do doubt this bill will end up eliminating that with a liability waiver clause.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
All this does is get the public to curate their own data that is being mined. Instead, the FTC should allow you to intentionally corrupt the data.
This.
In fact, it's perfectly legal (or at least, it used to be; who knows these days) to give false information or a false name as long as you're not trying to commit fraud. (Or impede justice; don't lie to the cops, just remain silent.)
-- Alastair
The most commonly ignored factor in most theories is human nature.