Data Privacy Day is January 28. And as Steve DelBianco writes at the NetChoice blog, now is an opportune time for it as Congress, the Commerce Department, and the Federal Trade Commission each have proposed new rights and rules for data privacy.
To appreciate Data Privacy Day you must first ignore the Euro-babble description of what is Data Privacy Day (“an international celebration of the dignity of the individual expressed through personal information”) and take it for what it really is: a prodding for Internet users to take a critical look at how they share and communicate information online.
Importantly, this is not a day for governments, but for users. As Steve writes, “the role for government should be in areas where users and business cannot act alone, including law enforcement, international data flows, and pre-empting a patchwork of state laws. Government should use is powers to pursue online fraud and criminal misuse of data, not to create rules that narrowly prescribe what and how data should be used.”
Also, check out the tech-friendly quotes from Obama’s State of the Union in Steve’s post.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.