In response to Professor Jonathan Zittrain’s op-ed in The New York Times last Monday about online privacy and open platforms (which Adam thoroughly refuted last week) I have a letter to the editor in today’s The New York Times:
To the Editor:
Re “Lost in the Cloud” (Op-Ed, July 20):
In discussing the privacy risks that have accompanied the growth of the Internet, Prof. Jonathan Zittrain rightly bemoans the willingness of governments to violate individuals’ privacy rights. Unfortunately, he proposes new legal restrictions that would stifle online innovation while doing little to enhance consumer privacy.
Mr. Zittrain proposes a “fair practices law” that would require companies to release personal data back to users upon request. Such a rule may sound workable, but purging specific data across globally dispersed server farms is no simple endeavor. Who is to pay for the implementation of such privacy procedures — especially for free services like Facebook or Twitter that have yet to turn a profit?
A better approach to online privacy is to educate users on safeguarding personal information. Ultimately, however, the only foolproof approach to protecting sensitive data online is to simply not disclose it.
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In a big post two months ago entitled “Age Verification Debate Continues; Schools Now at Center of Discussion,” I noted that there has been an important shift in the age verification debate: Schools and school records are increasingly being viewed as the primary mechanism to facilitate online identity authentication transactions. I pointed out that this raises two very serious questions: Do we want schools to serve as DMVs for our children? And, do we want more school records or information about our kids being accessed or put online?
Brad Stone of the
New York Times has just posted an important article with relevance to this debate. In it, he points out that:
performing so-called age verification for children is fraught with challenges. The kinds of publicly available data that Web companies use to confirm the identities of adults, like their credit card or Social Security numbers, are either not available for minors or are restricted by federal privacy laws. Nevertheless, over the last year, at least two dozen companies have sprung up with systems they claim will solve the problem. Surprisingly, their work is proving controversial and even downright unpopular among the very people who spend their days worrying about the well-being of children on the Web.
Child-safety activists charge that some of the age-verification firms want to help Internet companies tailor ads for children. They say these firms are substituting one exaggerated threat — the menace of online sex predators — with a far more pervasive danger from online marketers like junk food and toy companies that will rush to advertise to children if they are told revealing details about the users.
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