When Google Privacy Counsel Peter Fleischer introduced the company’s call for global privacy standards, I thought he mangled some basic concepts. He’s not the first, and others have gotten it worse – and more threateningly so – since.
But I’m impressed with the general tenor of his recent comments encouraging a focus on preventing consumer harm. Many in the privacy community are deeply wedded to “Fair Information Practices” – a varying set of rules that, followed by rote, would allegedly take care of privacy. Well, they don’t. They produce a lot of churn, and they soak up a lot of energy with regulation, compliance efforts, and what-have-you. But they don’t address what matters: protection of actual privacy and prevention of consumer harm.
“FIPs” aren’t all bad. Some of them are good. Some conflict with others. They’re just not a helpful framework for addressing the problems presented to us by the information age.
Last year, the DHS Privacy Committee produced a document unpacking the human values that matter (generally referred to as “privacy”). The focus should be on how information practices affect privacy and related values – chiefly, whether modern information practices cause people harm.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.