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The Trump Administration is Talking To Facebook and Google About Potential Rules For Online Privacy (washingtonpost.com)
The Trump administration is crafting a proposal to protect Web users' privacy, aiming to blunt global criticism that the absence of strict federal rules in the United States has enabled data mishaps at Facebook and others in Silicon Valley. From a report: Over the past month, the Commerce Department has been huddling with representatives of tech giants such as Facebook and Google, Internet providers including AT&T and Comcast, and consumer advocates [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source], according to four people familiar with the matter but not authorized to speak on the record. The government's goal is to release an initial set of ideas this fall that outlines Web users' rights, including general principles for how companies should collect and handle consumers' private information, the people said. The forthcoming blueprint could then become the basis for Congress to write the country's first wide-ranging online-privacy law, an idea the White House recently has said it could endorse. "Through the White House National Economic Council, the Trump Administration aims to craft a consumer privacy protection policy that is the appropriate balance between privacy and prosperity," Lindsay Walters, the president's deputy press secretary, said in a statement. "We look forward to working with Congress on a legislative solution consistent with our overarching policy."
Privacy "trumps" prosperity. Full stop.
As much as I deeply enjoy mocking Europe, they have much better consumer privacy protection than the US. It would be great to catch up a little. Plus: Trump making the US more like the EU? The heads exploding would be like the end of Kingsmen.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
In other words, the profits of corporations will have the same if not more priority as privacy, and what we'll end up with is "companies can do anything, so suck it".
This won't result in any privacy protections if companies say it will cut into profits.
It will end well for a butthurt libturd.
In other news, Mr. McGregor is consulting with Peter Rabbit on how to protect his carrot garden.
You must be sad to live in such a sad world.
He has a "red telephone" directly into Facebook and Twitter. I'll bet Facebook and Twitter are ecstatic about the opportunity to have conversations with Trump whenever he wants.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
This kind of stuff has been long time coming. At the moment the laws on the book are incredibly mute on what happens if a company loses your data. Hell even losing credit card information is pretty iffy in a court of law, unless you can show that your stolen credit card information was used to directly harm you financially. It is time that criminal liability was held to those who lose sensitive information. However, I will admit, that I myself don't have really firm ideas for what that restitution should look like. For the theft of credit card data, I think there definitely should be something that the company has to pay into to payout claims for a number of years and the amount per year and length of time be sliding values based on the depth of the breach. I think an out dated system that gets breached should have willful negligence tacked on to it and there be punitive damages awarded.
But all of those are just things I think and I can easily see lots of cons that can crop up from those things. I think this is going to be a difficult topic to get a good balance between the pros and cons, but that difficult task shouldn't stop us. Lawmakers have looked at this and seen the complexity and dizzying task before them and have opted to take a pass continually on it. It is time that we sat down and began talking about how we bring law and order to the Internet and do it in a fair and balanced way. We won't solve the problems overnight but we're just never going to solve them with a mentality of "Don't regulate the Internet!". I don't want to trample free speech and I don't think anyone else "truly" wants to do that. I don't want to remove anonymity either. But I feel we need to stop using those as arguments on why we can't bring under control other things that we all clearly do not want. I get it, we're going to screw those things among others up in the short term, but we ought to take the long view on this and that indicates that whatever we do indeed screw up, we will eventually correct that so long as we do not allow inertia to hold us back. Loosey Goosey has just become all too common with online security and it is time that there is some culpability for those who do not hold consumer data to the same standard as those whom it might affect if it is stolen.
The government's goal is to release an initial set of ideas this fall that outlines Web users' rights, including general principles for how companies should collect and handle consumers' private information...
How about [forcing] inter-operation of service providers' message & voice apps? That is, being able to use Telegram's message & voice app to communicate with WhatsAPP for instance?
Heck, I can effortlessly send email from whatever client I choose without worrying whether a recipient who has conveyed a valid address will receive it.
Is this so hard? I do not think so.
As much as I deeply enjoy mocking Europe, they have much better consumer privacy protection than the US. It would be great to catch up a little. Plus: Trump making the US more like the EU? The heads exploding would be like the end of Kingsmen.
I suspect they are spinning it this way to manipulate you, but that in reality they are using it to undermine privacy protections. My suspicion is that this isn't about privacy. Think about it. This is about companies wanting to *prevent* states from passing their own privacy laws, because of things like states passing laws against using facial recognition. Congress will pass a law to keep states from doing that, and that law will give big data companies legal cover both for (1) continuing to use their massive existing amounts of data, which is a large corporate asset, in AI work and (2) collecting additional data.
There will be some minimal federal protections in the law, probably aimed at nominally anonymizing the data or not using it to make spam phone calls or something else people will like that won't affect the companies that want to use it. But those are there mostly to give cover to politicians so they can spin it as protecting privacy.
Just a guess that would be in keeping with how government works.
If you don't want Facebook and Google to have so much of your data... stop giving it to them
I keep seeing people running the Facebook app, using Gmail for everything, and then wondering how Facebook and Google know so much about them.
> The Trump administration is crafting a proposal to protect Web users' privacy, aiming to blunt global criticism
When the fuck did this administration start giving a rat's ass about global criticism?
> "Through the White House National Economic Council, the Trump Administration aims to craft a consumer privacy protection policy that is the appropriate balance between privacy and prosperity," Lindsay Walters, the president's deputy press secretary, said in a statement.
Yeah, great understanding of the issue to begin with. This is going to go about as well as the "balance" between environmental protection and prosperity, consumer protection and prosperity, human rights and prosperity...
If your Information is public Then there should be no "rules". You've willfully made your information publicly available. Were you that stupid to make something public that should have been private? That's a YP (you problem).
Are we going to legislate stupidity too? If your information was chosen to be made public then the company that stores it (for free) can choose to share the publicly available information to anyone, en masse, or 1 by 1.
Don't forget that when people get privacy in the USA, megacorps get it too. You will be less able than ever to keep them in check.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
The Trump Administration is Talking To Foxes and Wolves About Potential Rules For Hen-house Safety.
No conflicts of interest here. No sir! None whatsoever.
Anyone storing private information is liable 100% for its unauthorized release.
They would be completely on the hook for compensating any losses and remediating any financial fallout.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
"Through the White House National Economic Council, the Trump Administration aims to craft a consumer privacy protection policy that is the appropriate balance between privacy and prosperity," Lindsay Walters, the president's deputy press secretary, said in a statement. "We look forward to working with Congress on a legislative solution consistent with our overarching policy."
translation:
we'll make sure to write the laws so that companies can do whatever they want,
because our overarching policy is to make sure that companies can do whatever they want.
but we'll be able to tell you we passed privacy laws, which will look really good, right ?
Absolute statements are never true
Since when does a government ask criminals how they'd like their laws?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Best way to keep private is just don't put your private data on the internet. We lived thousands of years without Antisocial media without any major issues. If you don't want them to have your data just don't use there product
Or you could take Advice from the Three Dead Trolls in a Baggy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eIUOUfhoJ8
No way the cows are going to get a fair cut.
They voted on it by freely giving information to companies like Google and Facebook. Trump is so anti-the people that he wants to overrule us and not allow us to make our own decisions.
Can US companies compromise and protect personal privacy, create data retention policies, and default security rules? My first reaction is to laugh out loud at their collective history. My second reaction is understanding and hope that they are willing to work to fix what the EU laws are trying to promote. After all the penalties of EU laws are not very friendly to big data.
The entire problem here is marketing companies and big government are in each other pockets. There is no incentive for either to create rules to penalize the other. Governments will not get their secret surveillance and big data will not get accurate info. I am hoping for something substantial, but I am expecting lots of hot air.
Continue to do whatever you want, give a copy to the NSA.
Oh, but any government official is exempt from having his/her data siphoned.
He wants to make sure there isn't another "mishap." One that swings the vote the *other* way.
Twitler wants to make certain there isn't another "mishap." A mishap that swings the next election against him.
Facebook and Google are the worst offenders. We should be asking the EFF, and taking some cues from GPDR. Asking Facebook to write privacy legislation is like asking Wells Fargo to write banking laws.
Oh, wait - murca
---- I'll take you in a Hunt deathmatch any day.
This needs higher visibility, but I'm all out of mod points.
Given this administration's track record, I think we can make a pretty good guess about how this is going to work out. Consumers will have the right to drop their pants and grab their ankles, and that will be about all.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
so is the computer our friend or not?
I’m sorry, citizen. That information is not available
at this time.
Shouldn't the balance be between privacy and freedom of speech? Why is profit a consideration for online privacy rules? Are we saying that if we have laws that provide privacy protection, they *must* take the profits of companies that will need to comply with them into consideration when creating them?
Damn. At least it's not underhanded, I guess?
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
The U.S. badly needs "truth in lending" style legislation that forces companies to disclose in simple, concise wording what their privacy policy "highlights" are. Such as:
* This service is provided free of charge to you because you are the actual product we sell.
* All of your activities are monitored and recorded.
* Your personal information collected is sold to third parties, including political and/or government agencies.
No more allowing companies to bury this important information 100 pages deep in intentionally difficult to read legalese (like lenders used to be allowed to do!).
This needed to happen years ago. I don't care who is sponsoring it, it needs to be done, and stat.
Both the United States and Europe are batshit insane and hurting smaller businesses. This is wrong. Your not supporting actual privacy. I'm a huge supporter of actual privacy. But this is not how you get it. It's a smokescreen for undermining small businesses. If the government actually cared about privacy they would eliminate the toll booths and pass laws protecting users from invasive government monitoring rather than leaving it for a supreme court to rule on. You don't have to use facebook. I don't. The idea that we need protection from these companies is misleading. The government needs to stop forcing me to supply it with information that it then publishes- like my home address. I can't tell you how many places you can find my home address all because the government demands a physical address where I live or work rather than a mailing address of my business. Fuck the government. We need violent revolution somewhere by people who actually care about privacy. Not ass holes like Trump, Hillary, Obama, or Bernie who do nothing but deceive the masses and proceed to continue to support the use of violence against peaceful people. And yes- using guns and threats of violence to extract cash is NOT moral. It's wrong. Just as it's wrong to take something that isn't yours. And creating new words or calling it taxation doesn't magically justify immoral actions. I can't go rob some place and say "I was just collecting taxes". The mob did that sort of thing and we prosecuted them for.. ohh wait- we didn't. Because the government doing immoral shit is OK if it the ends justify the means. NO NO NO! They don't.
What is on-line privacy is all part of Putin's plan!