On this week’s John Stossel show on Fox Business Network, I debated Internet privacy, advertising, and data collection issues with Michael Fertik of Reputation.com. In the few minutes we had for the segment, I tried to reiterate a couple of keep points that we’ve hammered repeatedly here in the past:
- There’s no free lunch. All the free sites and service we enjoy online today are powered by advertising and data collection. [see this op-ed]
- There is no clear harm in most cases, or what some argue is harm also can have many benefits that are rarely discussed. [see this paper.]
- There’s little acknowledgement of the trade-offs involved in having government create an information control regime for the Internet. [see this filing and these three essays: 1, 2, 3.]
- The ultimate code of “fair information practices” is the First Amendment, which favors free speech, openness, and transparency over secrecy and information control. [see this piece.]
- “Hands Off the Net” is a policy that has served us well. There are dangerous ramifications for our economy and long-term Internet freedoms if we continue down the road of “European-izing” privacy law here in the States. [see this essay and this filing.]
- At some point, personal responsibility needs to come into the equation. With so many privacy enhancing empowerment tools already on the market, it begs the question: If consumers don’t take steps to use those tools, why should government intervene and take action for them?
Anyway, here’s the 7-min video of the debate between Fertik and me:
http://www.youtube.com/v/rYBsOK47LUw&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&version=3
September 8 — this Tuesday — is the deadline for filing objections against the Google Book Settlement. A number of trade associations, corporations, authors, and advocacy groups have weighed in, including the
Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union. They argue that approving the Google Book Settlement in its current form, without explicitly spelling out data collection practices, would endanger user privacy. EFF and ACLU have threatened to file an objection to the Settlement unless Google commits to a stringent privacy policy for Google Book Search.
I think the privacy risks posed by Google Book Search are being blown out of proportion, as I explained in the Examiner Opinion Zone last month. While EFF and others have raised some legitimate fears about the possibility of government getting its hands on Google Book Search user data, these privacy concerns are not unique to Google Book Search, nor are they legitimate grounds for the court to reject the Google Book Settlement.
In a letter I submitted yesterday as an amicus curiae brief to U.S. District Judge Denny Chin, who is presiding over the Google Books case, I argue that privacy concerns should not determine the court’s evaluation of the Settlement:
Competitive Enterprise Institute Letter http://d.scribd.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=19440943&access_key=key-2o4o6jm42x4fvx9dyiwp&page=1&version=1&viewMode=
Jeff Jonas has published an important post: “Your Movements Speak for Themselves: Space-Time Travel Data is Analytic Super-Food!”
More than you probably realize, your mobile device is a digital sensor, creating records of your whereabouts and movements:
Mobile devices in America are generating something like 600 billion geo-spatially tagged transactions per day. Every call, text message, email and data transfer handled by your mobile device creates a transaction with your space-time coordinate (to roughly 60 meters accuracy if there are three cell towers in range), whether you have GPS or not. Got a Blackberry? Every few minutes, it sends a heartbeat, creating a transaction whether you are using the phone or not. If the device is GPS-enabled and you’re using a location-based service your location is accurate to somewhere between 10 and 30 meters. Using Wi-Fi? It is accurate below 10 meters.
The process of deploying this data to markedly improve our lives is underway. A friend of Jonas’ says that space-time travel data used to reveal traffic tie-ups shaves two to four hours off his commute each week. When it is put to full use, “the world we live in will fundamentally change. Organizations and citizens alike will operate with substantially more efficiency. There will be less carbon emissions, increased longevity, and fewer deaths.”
This progress is not without cost:
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FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz warned yesterday that companies involved in Web advertising face their “last chance” to “voluntarily” adopt stricter policies governing the use and collection of consumer information, Reuters reports. This isn’t the first time the FTC has threatened the advertising industry with regulation, but it signals a sense of immediacy that may pressure industry leaders to change their practices in coming weeks.
Leibowitz presumably wants to quell widespread concern that Internet companies like Google and AT&T have “excessive control” over consumer information. But what’s excessive about using information that individuals have voluntarily handed over for marketing purposes, subject to legally enforceable rules laid out from the get-go?
Users ultimately control their data, not firms. After all, only data that users transmit can be collected. When a user visits a website, their IP address may be recorded, and when a user submits a query to a search engine, the search term can be logged. This is how the Internet has always worked.
Not all consumers understand what information is gathered about them as they browse online. The best way to protect such users is not through regulation, but by educating — and, therefore, empowering — users. Volumes have been written on privacy and data security, and the ongoing TLF series “Privacy Solutions” offers a growing body of tips on how consumers can achieve the level of privacy that suits them.
Understandably, some people are uncomfortable with their queries being logged, and would prefer that websites simply not track any data. Some sites are willing to do just that — Cuil, a search engine launched in 2008, promises to never log IP addresses or even use cookies (as Jim has noted). Other anonymity solutions rely on secure virtual tunnels that can mask users’ actual IP addresses.
Still, no matter what the FTC does, transmitting data in plaintext over the Internet will never be truly “safe.” Robust end-to-end encryption is the only surefire method of ensuring information cannot be seen by anybody except the sender and the recipient. Even then, information is only as safe to the extent that the party at the other end of the line can be trusted.
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I’ve been quite depressed to witness Bruce Schneier’s ongoing conversion from opponent of government intervention in the high-tech economy (at least on encryption) to vociferous proponent (at least in terms of privacy regulation). Anyway, his latest cheerleading piece for government privacy regulation in The Wall Street Journal includes lots of fear-mongering about private website data collection for, God forbid, purposes of trying to better target advertising and market us products we might actually want.
Schneier uses the term “deceptive” several times in the piece to refer to privacy policies that don’t make it explicitly clear that some of the information you leave on a site, or that is collected preemptively by them, will be used to craft more targeted marketing efforts. Like many other would-be privacy regulators, Schneier seemingly wants companies to fly blimps over your desk as you surf the Net with big signs that basically say: ‘Hey stupid, your info may be used to market you stuff.’ It’s hard to be against more disclosure, of course — and most sites spell out what they do with data in their privacy policies — but it never seems to be good enough for most privacy advocates, who paint consumers out to be mindless sheep who cannot be trusted to make wise decisions for themselves. Sorry, but I just don’t buy it.
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The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.