Many of my free market friends have been making the case that government action is unnecessary to address the privacy trouble in which Facebook has recently found itself. I agree with them completely. The reason is that I believe that the given choice, individuals acting in the market will act to discipline unscrupulous or stupid companies. This is precisely what we’ve begun to see happen to Facebook.
It therefore bothers me when folks go beyond mere defense of free market to pretending that corporations can do no wrong. Facebook, for example, has committed a terrible breach of trust against its users, and it should pay the price. Still, on the NetChoice blog, Steve DelBianco writes this about Facebook’s new privacy options:
Facebook is making these moves partly to placate a handful of professional privacy critics, as we described on our post this week. But as with most moves made in reaction to critics, there’s a chance Facebook might have moved too far.
As part of this change, Facebook is making it trivial for users to stop applications and websites from knowing anything about you. If lots of users select this option, I’m afraid it could restrict Facebook’s use of targeted advertising (those ads on the right side of your Facebook pages) and their new instant personalization program. Here’s why we should all be concerned if everyone opts-out of sharing anything:
First, we’ll still see ads, only they won’t be so relevant[.] … Second, and far more concerning, is the effect on Facebook’s ad revenue[.]
I’m not a “professional privacy critic,” yet I know I’ll never trust Facebook with any of my data ever again. I hear the same sentiment from many of my friends, acquaintances, and other regular folks I follow online. Sometimes, companies react because they made a dumb mistake (or perhaps in this case a repeated one that makes one wonder whether it’s a mistake at all), not only in response to privacy advocates. I know Steve’s saying Facebook’s only partly reacting to critics, but I believe that any such fraction is very small. Continue reading →
In a nod to the popular Dos Equis commercials, Steve DelBianco blogs about the new Facebook privacy controls and says “Stay thirsty, Facebook. We need you guys to keep innovating.”
Right now you might not care much about Facebook’s ad revenue. But you might start caring if falling ad revenue forced Facebook to cut spending on things like server capacity and speed, content vetting, quality control, or development of new features and access for mobile devices.
You’d also start caring if Facebook over-reacted to privacy critics by slowing-down its innovation. I’m talking about innovations like “instant personalization“, which helps selected websites customize your content based on your Facebook profile. And innovation like a social plugin for content websites, which makes it so easy for you to refer articles or news to your Facebook friends. Both of these innovations help create a personal, social Internet experience, and they do it though sharing of information.
As I’ve previously blogged, we’re just at the tip of the iceberg when it comes to socializing the web. Whether it’s over beers or on the Internet, users want to be social — even if we’re not the most interesting guy in the world. So keep innovating, Facebook.
Today, Facebook announced significant improvements to its privacy management tools. As explained in the new Privacy Guide, this upgrade allows users to exercise greater and easier choice over sharing of their information on the site and through the site to third party applications and external websites.
By giving users powerful new tools to further protect their privacy, Facebook has employed a potent weapon to deal with marketplace apprehensions: self-regulation. Government intervention stands little chance in acting as swiftly or as effectively to tackle such matters. Rather than short-circuiting the self-regulatory process, we should trust that users are capable of choosing for themselves if given the right tools, and that companies like Facebook will respond to reputational pressure to develop, and constantly improve, those tools. That approach is far more likely to move us towards the ideal of user empowerment than is heavy-handed government regulation, which would override marketplace experimentation and have many unintended consequences for free online sites and services like Facebook.
Today’s announcement represents a major leap forward for privacy controls, but of course the company will have to keep innovating in this area as it does in others. In particular, I hope Facebook and other social networking services like MySpace, Buzz, LinkedIn and Flickr will all work on the next logical step forward: building Applications Programming Interfaces (API) that will allow third party tools to tap into each site’s unique privacy settings so that users can have a single “dashboard” for controlling how they share data across platforms. Continue reading →
There’s an inherent paradox in the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) media ownership regulations and the new Notice of Inquiry that the agency has just launched looking into those rules. Like everything else the FCC has been doing lately, this NOI poses hundreds of questions about the topic at hand. In this case, the agency is interested in knowing what the impact of its byzantine regulatory regime for media ownership has been. Complicating matters even more is that fact that the FCC wants people to provide detailed answers about the impact of these rules on amorphous values like “diversity” and “localism.” So, the agency asks, what has been the impact of the local TV ownership rule, the local radio ownership rule, the newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership rule, the radio/TV cross-ownership rule, the dual network rule, and so on, on the marketplace, competition, diversity, localism, etc.
But therein lies the fundamental paradox of the FCC’s inquiry and the media ownership regulations in general: So long as the rules are preemptive and prophylactic in character, we will never get clear answers to the questions the agency poses. By definition, the agency’s media ownership rules make experimentation with new business models illegal. It is per se criminal to enter into combinations that the agency has presumptively divined to be counter to “the public interest,” whatever that means. Thus, we can never get definitive answers to the questions the agency poses when “the marketplace” isn’t a truly free marketplace at all. It is a regulatory construct artificially constrained in countless ways.
So, what’s the answer here? In a word: Antitrust. While I’m no fan of over-zealous antitrust regulation, it has one huge advantage over the media ownership regime that the FCC enforces: It doesn’t preemptively seek to determine supposedly sensible market structures or ownership patterns. The threat of antitrust intervention can be a very dangerous thing, and wrecking-ball style antitrust interventions are rarely sensible, but at least the DOJ and FTC aren’t turning the regulatory dials on a massive media marketplace industrial policy the way the Federal Communications Commission does with its media ownership regulations. Continue reading →
Facebook has had a tough month. The site’s latest round of privacy changes, implemented last month, spurred stiff backlash — not just from so-called privacy advocates, but also from several U.S. Senators. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg shot back with an op-ed in The Washington Post, as Braden discussed here yesterday.
I’ve had much to say about Facebook’s past privacy controversies (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), but what really sticks out about the latest anti-Facebook backlash is who’s leading the charge: U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer.
Seriously, of all people, Chuck Schumer should be the last to criticize Facebook’s privacy practices. That’s because Schumer is leading the push in Congress to establish a biometric national identification regime. If Schumer had his way, all Americans, including U.S. citizens, wishing to legally work in this country would be required by law to obtain a national ID card! Compared to this highly invasive potential exercise of the state’s coercive power, concerns about Facebook’s privacy practices seem downright trivial.
Continue reading →
In this week’s episode of the Surprisingly Free Podcast, I talk to TLF’s very own Adam Thierer, president of The Progress & Freedom Foundation and the Director of its Center for Digital Media Freedom. We discuss the future of media and Adam explains recent proposals to subsidize journalists and media companies. He outlines problems with the proposals, such as threats to free speech and separation of press and state. He also addresses newspapers as non-profits, shared experiences vs. diversity, and journalism ethics in the context of the recently scooped iPhone.
Do check out the interview, and consider subscribing to the show on iTunes. Past guests have included James Grimmelman on online harassment and the Google Books case, Michael Geist on ACTA, Tom Hazlett on spectrum reform, and Tyler Cowen on just about everything.
Coming up in the next few weeks we’ll have Adrian Johns, Nick Carr, Clay Shirky, Gina Trapani, and many more great guests! So what are you waiting for? Subscribe!
We had a great discussion yesterday about the technical underpinnings of the ongoing privacy policy debate in light of the discussion draft of privacy legislation recently released by Chairman Rick Boucher (see PFF’s initial comments here and here). I moderated a free-wheeling discussion among terrific panel consisting of:
Here’s the audio (video to come!)
Ari got us started with an intro to the Boucher bill and Shane offered an overview of the technical mechanics of online advertising and why it requires data about what users do online. Lorrie & Ari then talked about concerns about data collection, leading into a discussion of the challenges and opportunities for empowering privacy-sensitive consumers to manage their online privacy without breaking the advertising business model that sustains most Internet content and services. In particular, we had a lengthy discussion of the need for computer-readable privacy disclosures like P3P (pioneered by Lorrie & Ari) and the CLEAR standard developed by Yahoo! and others as a vital vehicle for self-regulation, but also an essential ingredient in any regulatory system that requires that notice be provided of the data collection practices of all tracking elements on the page. Continue reading →
The announcement yesterday from key Congressional Democrats of an effort to reform the Communications Act put me in a nostalgic mood. Here follows one of my longest efforts yet to bury the lede.
One of my favorite courses in law school was Abner Mikva’s “Legislative Process” course, which he taught while serving on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals and before his tenure as White House counsel to President Clinton. Mikva had previously served in Congress; indeed, one of the first votes I ever cast was for Mikva while an undergraduate at Northwestern University.
(It was a remarkable period at the law school. The year Mikva signed on as a lecturer was also the first year on the faculty for three professors just starting their academic careers: Larry Lessig, Elena Kagan, and Barack Obama. I took two classes with Lessig, including an independent study on the impact of technology on the practice of law, but regrettably none from the other two.) Continue reading →
I’ve had plenty to say here before about the “monkey see, monkey do” theories bandied about by some researchers and regulatory proponents who believe there is a correlation between exposure to depictions of violence in media (in video games, movies, TV, etc) and real-world acts of aggression or violent crime. I have made three arguments in response to such claims:
(1) Lab studies by psychology professors and students are not representative of real-world behavior/results. Indeed, lab experiments are little more than artificial constructions of reality and of only limited value in gauging the impact of violently-themed media on actual human behavior.
(2) Real-world data trends likely offer us a better indication of the impact of media on human behavior over the long-haul.
(3) Correlation does not necessarily equal causation. Whether we are talking about those artificial lab experiments or the real-world data sets, we must always keep this first principle of statistical analysis in mind. That is particularly the case when it comes to human behavior, which is complex and ever-changing.
What got me thinking about all this again was the release of the FBI’s latest “Preliminary Annual Uniform Crime Report of 2009.” The results are absolutely stunning. Here’s a brief summary from New York Times:
Despite turmoil in the economy and high unemployment, crime rates fell significantly across the United States in 2009, according to a report released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation on Monday. Compared with 2008, violent crimes declined by 5.5 percent last year, and property crimes decreased 4.9 percent, according to the F.B.I.’s preliminary annual crime report. There was an overall decline in reported crimes for the third straight year; the last increase was in 2006.
Here are the percentage declines by overall crime category for the past 4 years, and more tables and charts depicting the declines for specific juvenile crimes can be found down below: Continue reading →
I was very pleased to hear this announcement today from leading Senate and House Democrats regarding a much-needed update of our nation’s communications laws:
Today, Senator John D. (Jay) Rockefeller IV, Chairman of the U.S. Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, Rep. Henry A. Waxman, the Chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, Senator John F. Kerry, the Chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet, and Rep. Rick Boucher, the Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet announced they will start a process to develop proposals to update the Communications Act. As the first step, they will invite stakeholders to participate in a series of bipartisan, issue-focused meetings beginning in June. A list of topics for discussion and details about this process will be forthcoming.
This is great news, and an implicit acknowledgment by top Democratic leaders that the FCC most certainly does not have the authority to move forward unilaterally with regulatory proposals such as Net neutrality mandates or Title II reclassification efforts.
I very much look forward to engaging with House and Senate staff on these issues since this is something I’ve spent a great deal of time thinking about over the past 15 years. Most recently, Mike Wendy and I released a paper entitled, “The Constructive Alternative to Net Neutrality Regulation and Title II Reclassification Wars,” in which we outline some of the possible reform options out there. We built upon PFF’s “Digital Age Communications Act Project,” (DACA) which was introduced in February of 2005 with the ultimate aim of crafting policy that is adaptive to the frequently changing communications landscape. You can find all the white papers from the 5 major working groups here. I also encourage those interested in this issue to take a look at the video from this event we hosted earlier this month asking, “What Should the Next Communications Act Look Like?” Lots of good ideas came up there.
Anyway, down below I have included the video from that event as well as a better description of the DACA model for those interested in details about how that model of Communications Act reform would work. I think DACA holds great promise going forward since it represents a moderate, non-partisan approach to reforming communications policy for the better. I pulled this summary from the paper that Mike Wendy and I recently penned: Continue reading →
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