FCC CIO: Consumers Need Privacy Controls In the Internet of Everything Era

Lemeowski writes: Who is responsible for ensuring security and privacy in the age of the Internet of Things? As the number of Internet-connected devices explodes — Gartner estimates that 25 billion devices and objects will be connected to the Internet by 2020 — security and privacy issues are poised to affect everyone from families with connected refrigerators to grandparents with healthcare wearables. In this interview, U.S. Federal Communications Commission CIO David Bray says control should be put in the hands of individual consumers. Speaking in a personal capacity, Bray shares his learnings from a recent educational trip to Taiwan and Australia he took as part of an Eisenhower Fellowship: "A common idea Bray discussed with leaders during his Eisenhower Fellowship was that the interface for selecting privacy preferences should move away from individual Internet platforms and be put into the hands of individual consumers." Bray says it could be done through an open source agent that uses APIs to broker their privacy preferences on different platforms.

Comments

The answer is simple

[AK Marc]

All personal data should be presumed copyrighted by the person it describes (including email and such). And a new law is passed that requires any company that sells personal data is required to keep a record of where that data came from, and any requests to delete that data would be fed upstream to the sources of that data.

Today "privacy" can't work with things like "take me off your list". Because the company that makes the call doesn't "own" the list. They rent it from a company that keeps a master list. The master list company will *never* try to contact a customer directly, because then they'd be responsible for taking someone off the list, when required.

But if the list renter was required by law to pass the removal request to the source of the data, then "take me off your list" would have real teeth. In addition to helping the people who complain and ask to be removed, it would help everyone because it would drive the master list companies out of business. Rent-seeking middle men who profit from arbitrage caused by legal loopholes should never exist.