Mediapost has published an interview I gave to Omar Tawakol, founder of the BlueKai registry entitled “User Empowerment, Not Regulation, Is The Answer to Privacy Concerns About Targeted Ads” in which I summarize the arguments Adam Thierer and I have been making since our “Principles to Guide the Debate” piece last September.
We argue for user empowerment over restrictive defaults (like “opt-in”) for data use and collection because, as the Supreme Court held in 2000: “Technology expands the capacity to choose; and it denies the potential of this revolution if we assume the Government is best positioned to make these choices for us.”
We promote tools that let users make their own decisions about privacy, not only because those decisions are fundamentally subjective, but because regulatory mandates could stifle the development of online content and commerce.
I also note the parallels between speech controls and privacy regulation, and call for a consistent, principled approach to both:
Since 1997, the Supreme Court has struck down multiple legislative attempts to censor online and offline content [especially the CDA] because there were “less restrictive alternatives” that would not so heavily burden free speech rights. In a 2000 cable-related decision, the Court held that “targeted blocking [by users] is less restrictive than banning, and the Government cannot ban speech if targeted blocking is a feasible and effective means of furthering its compelling interests.”
Courts have struck down other federal and state speech controls because parents had the tools to filter their kids’ access to information online, in video games, etc., as described in my PFF colleague Adam Thierer’s ongoing catalog of these tools…
Many who oppose industry self-regulation are not really “consumer advocates” because they don’t recognize that consumers have many, competing values. Those regulatory advocates are more interested in their preferred one-size-fits-all mandates than in empowering users to determine their own privacy preferences.
Like advocates of censorship, privacy zealots assert great dangers to which citizens are supposedly oblivious but which urgently require government intervention-dismissing arguments to the contrary as either uninformed or irresponsible.
The comments on the interview are equally worth reading. Jeff Chester, who has made a career out of attacking advertising, quickly posted a comment dismissing, but ignoring, my arguments about consumer welfare as corporate propaganda—just as he did with his comment on the post Adam and I wrote in June about congressional hearings on the issue featuring Chester (and Scott Cleland, the right-wing “Bizarro Chester“). I’ve had it with Chester’s ad hominem attacks on the motives of those who disagree with him, as I explained in my reply to Chester: Continue reading →
Internet policy Shame Artist extraordinaire Chris Soghoian has struck again! Chris recently shamed the online advertising industry into improving their privacy practices with his Targeted Advertising Cookie Opt-Out (TACO) plug-in for Firefox. Now Chris has set his sight on the security practices of cloud service providers.
A letter released this morning, signed by 37 leading online security experts (and organized by Chris), calls on Google to offer persistent SSL (HTTPS) encryption by default for all Google services—or at the very least, to make more visible the option currently given to users to opt-in to use SSL for all communications. Google, in its response, indicated that it was already “looking into whether it would make sense to turn on HTTPS as the default for all Gmail users.”
While Google’s response identifies some clear problems with implementing persistent SSL for all users (esp. connection speed), few would deny that it makes sense for webmail providers to encrypt all traffic using SSL, rather than sending email data “in the clear,” which risks interception by hackers. We at PFF hold no brief for Google, in fact we have found ourselves disagreeing with them on many other occasions on a range of issues (most notably net neutrality mandates). Nonetheless, on this front, Google has long been a leader, having offered SSL since Gmail launched and having begun providing the persistent HTTPS option last summer while most of their competitors still use SSL only for the initial authentication that occurs when a user first signs in. While the letter focuses on Google and webmail in particular, this issue has far broader implications for all online cloud service providers.
No Free Lunch: The Costs of Encryption
Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, etc. are, of course, “free” (
i.e., ad-supported). Google in particular has lead the way in increasing the functionality offered in Gmail, not just constantly increasing the total storage space provided to every user (now over 7GB), but regularly adding innovative new features—at no charge to users. Continue reading →
Berin recently encouraged me to re-read Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy, which I hadn’t looked at since I first read it back in 1995 or 96. I’m glad I did since Sowell’s work has always been profoundly influential on my thinking (especially his masterpiece, A Conflict of Visions) and I had forgotten how useful The Vision of the Anointed was in helping me understand the reoccurring model that drives ideological crusades to expand government power over our lives and economy.
“The great ideological crusades of the twentieth-century intellectuals have ranged across the most disparate fields,” Sowell noted in the book. But what they all had in common, he argued, was “their moral exaltation of the anointed above others, who are to have their different views nullified and superseded by the views of the anointed, imposed via the power of government.” (p. 5) These elitist, government-expanding crusades shared several key elements, which Sowell identified as follows:
- Assertion of a great danger to the whole society, a danger to which the masses of people are oblivious.
- An urgent need for government action to avert impending catastrophe.
- A need for government to drastically curtail the dangerous behavior of the many, in response to the prescient conclusions of the few.
- A disdainful dismissal of arguments to the contrary as either uninformed, irresponsible, or motivated by unworthy purposes.
You can see this model at work on a daily basis today with our government’s various efforts to reshape our economy, but I think this model is equally applicable to debates over social policy and speech control. In particular, the various “technopanics” I have been writing about recently fit this model. (See 1, 2, 3, 4, 5). For example, consider how this plays out in the debate over online social networking:
Continue reading →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.