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."

Comments

Data Verification

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Data Verification

[Jane Q. Public]

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.

Good luck with that

[markdavis]

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.

Re:Good luck with that

[Trepidity]

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.

Re:Good luck with that

[TubeSteak]

I purposefully introduce inaccuracies into corporate data sets.
Slightly misspelled names, incorrect birth day/month/year, variable spellings of my street address.

note: the post office has always gotten my mail to me, misspellings and everything,
but it's enough to prevent lazy companies from matching that information to an existing profile.

Has been the law in France since 1978

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.ambafrance-uk.org/Protection-of-freedoms-in-France

Two problems

[Rougement]

"Voluntary" and "ability to correct them" How about "compulsory" "removal" of my data if I should choose?

Re:Isn't this what the free market advocates claim

[Charliemopps]

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.

Re:Back up a bit.

[Dcnjoe60]

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?

Re:Isn't this what the free market advocates claim

[LordLimecat]

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