What Unites Advocates of Speech Controls & Privacy Regulation? [pdf]
by Adam Thierer & Berin Szoka
The Progress & Freedom Foundation,
Progress on Point No. 16.19
Anyone who has spent time following debates about speech and privacy regulation comes to recognize the striking parallels between these two policy arenas. In this paper we will highlight the common rhetoric, proposals, and tactics that unite these regulatory movements. Moreover, we will argue that, at root, what often animates calls for regulation of both speech and privacy are two remarkably elitist beliefs:
- People are too ignorant (or simply too busy) to be trusted to make wise decisions for themselves (or their children); and/or,
- All or most people share essentially the same values or concerns and, therefore, “community standards” should trump household (or individual) standards.
While our use of the term “elitism” may unduly offend some understandably sensitive to populist demagoguery, our aim here is not to launch a broadside against elitism as
Time magazine culture critic William H. Henry once defined it: “The willingness to assert unyieldingly that one idea, contribution or attainment is better than another.”[1] Rather, our aim here is to critique that elitism which rises to the level of political condescension and legal sanction. We attack not so much the beliefs of some leaders, activists, or intellectuals that they have a better idea of what it in the public’s best interest than the public itself does, but rather the imposition of those beliefs through coercive, top-down mandates.
That sort of elitism—elitism enforced by law—is often the objective of speech and privacy regulatory advocates. Our goal is to identify the common themes that unite these regulatory movements, explain why such political elitism is unwarranted, and make it clear how it threatens individual liberty as well as the future of free and open Internet. As an alternative to this elitist vision, we advocate an empowerment agenda: fostering an environment in which users have the tools and information they need to make decisions for themselves and their families. Continue reading →
The first meeting of the Online Safety Technology Working Group (OSTWG) took place today and I just wanted to provide interested parties with relevant info and links in case they want to keep track of the task force’s work. As I mentioned back in late April, this new task force was established by the “Protecting Children in the 21st Century Act,” (part of the ‘‘Broadband Data Improvement Act’,’ Pub. L. No. 110-385) and it will report to the Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information at the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA).
I’m happy to be serving on this new working group and I am particularly honored to be serving as the chairman of 1 of the 4 subcommittees. The four subcommittees will address: data retention, child pornography, educational efforts, and parental controls technologies. I am chairing that last subcommittee on parental controls. The task force has about 35 members and we have a year to conduct our research and report back to Congress. Here are some relevant links from the NTIA website that provide additional details about this task force:
Of course, this is certainly not the first task force to explore online safety issues. There was the COPA Commission (2000), the “Thornburgh Commission” report (2002), the U.K. “Byron Commission” report (2008), the Harvard Berkman Center’s Internet Safety Technical Task Force (2008), and the NCTA-iKeepSafe-CommonSenseMedia “Point Smart, Click Safe” working group, which is due to issue its final report shortly. [Full disclosure: I was a member of that last two task forces as well.] I’m currently working on a short paper that attempts to summarize the remarkably similar findings of these important child safety working groups. Generally speaking, they all concluded that education and empowerment, not regulation, were the real keys to moving forward and making our kids safer online.
Over at Computerworld, Ben Rothke makes the case for “Why Information Must Be Destroyed.” “Given the vast amount of paper and digital media that amasses over time,” he argues, “effective information destruction policies and practices are now a necessary part of doing business and will likely save organizations time, effort and heartache, legal costs as well as embarrassment and more.” He continues:
Every organization has data that needs to be destroyed. Besides taxes, what unites every business is that they possess highly sensitive information that should not be seen by unauthorized persons. While some documents can be destroyed minutes after printing, regulations may require others to be archived from a few years to permanently. But between these two ends of the scale, your organization can potentially have a large volume of hard copy data occupying space as a liability, both from a legal and information security perspective. Depending on how long you’ve been in business, the number of physical sites and the number of people you employ, it’s possible to have hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of pages of hard copy stored throughout your company — much of which is confidential data that can be destroyed.
He’s no doubt correct that it makes good business sense to routinely purge data — both physical and digital — to guard against theft, misplacement, leaks, abuse, or whatever else. Of course, in the context of digital information, there are many folks who would like to see digital records purged more frequently to avoid growing concerns about online privacy. I think most of those concerns are over-stated, but it can’t hurt to destroy most collected information after a certain period to play it safe and keep customers happy.
Problem is, as we discussed here last week, if some lawmakers in Washington get their way, it might be illegal to do that! Quite obviously, data retention mandates are at odds with data destruction efforts. [Mitch Wagner has more coverage of the data retention debate over at Information Week and he quotes my PFF colleague Sid Rosenzweig.]
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