Articles by Adam Thierer 
Senior Fellow in Technology & Innovation at the R Street Institute in Washington, DC. Formerly a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, President of the Progress & Freedom Foundation, Director of Telecommunications Studies at the Cato Institute, and a Fellow in Economic Policy at the Heritage Foundation.
Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) and Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) have reintroduced their “Do Not Track Kids Act,” which, according to this press release, “amends the historic Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 (COPPA), will extend, enhance and update the provisions relating to the collection, use and disclosure of children’s personal information and establishes new protections for personal information of children and teens.” I quickly scanned the new bill and it looks very similar to their previous bill of the same name that they introduced in 2011 and which I wrote about here and then critiqued at much greater length in a subsequent Mercatus Center working paper (“Kids, Privacy, Free Speech & the Internet: Finding The Right Balance”).
Since not much appears to have changed, I would just encourage you to check out my old working paper for a discussion of why this legislation raises a variety of technical and constitutional issues. But I remain perplexed by how supporters of this bill think they can devise age-stratified online privacy protections without requiring full-blown age verification for all Internet users. And once you go down that path, as I note in my paper, you open up a huge Pandora’s Box of problems that we have already grappled with for many years now. As I noted in my paper, the real irony here is that the “problem with these efforts is that expanding COPPA would require the collection of more personal information about kids and parents. For age verification to be effective at the scale of the Internet, the collection of massive amounts of additional data is necessary.” Continue reading →
My friend and frequent co-blogger Larry Downes has shown how lawmaking in the information age is inexorably governed by “The Law of Disruption” or the fact that “technology changes exponentially, but social, economic, and legal systems change incrementally.” This law is “a simple but unavoidable principle of modern life,” he said, and it will have profound implications for the way businesses, government, and culture evolve going forward. “As the gap between the old world and the new gets wider,” he argues, “conflicts between social, economic, political, and legal systems” will intensify and “nothing can stop the chaos that will follow.” This has profound ramifications for high-tech policymaking, or at least it should.
A powerful illustration of the Law of Disruption in action comes from this cautionary tale told by telecom attorney Jonathan Askin in his new essay, “A Remedy to Clueless Tech Lawyers.” In the early 2000s, Askin served as legal counsel to Free World Dialup (FWD), “a startup that had the potential to dramatically disrupt the telecom sector” with its peer-to-peer IP network that could provide free global voice communications. Askin notes that “FWD paved the way for another startup—Skype. But FWD was Skype before Skype was Skype. The difference was that FWD had U.S. attorneys who put the reigns on FWD to seek FCC approvals to launch free of regulatory constraints.” Here’s what happened to FWD according to Askin: Continue reading →
I think I owe Tom Brokaw an apology. When I first started reading his most recent Wall Street Journal column, “Imagine the Tweets During the Cuban Missile Crisis,” I assumed that I was in for one of those hyper-nosalgic essays about how the ‘good ‘ol days’ of mass media had passed us by and why the new media era is an unmitigated disaster. Instead, I was pleased to read his very balanced and sensible view of the old versus news media environments. Reflecting on the evolution of the media marketplace over the past 50 years since JFK’s assassination, Brokaw notes that:
The media climate has changed dramatically. The New Frontier, as Kennedy liked to call his administration, received a great deal of attention, but 50 years ago the major national information sources consisted of a handful of big-city daily newspapers, a few weekly news periodicals and two dominant TV network evening newscasts. Now the political news comes at us 24/7 on cable, through the air, the digital universe, on radio and print. And it comes to us more and more as opinion rather than a recitation of the facts as best they can be determined. News is a hit-and-run game, for the most part, with too little accountability for error.
This leads Brokaw to wonder if the amazing media metamorphosis has been, on net, positive or negative. “The virtual town square has been wired and expanded,” he notes, “but the question remains whether more voices make for a healthier political climate. With a keystroke we can easily move from an online credible source of information to a website larded with opinion or deliberately malicious erroneous claims. Have we simply enlarged the megaphone, cranked up the decibel level, and rallied the like-minded without regard to facts or consequences?” Continue reading →
Here’s the video from a recent panel I sat on at the 4th annual Privacy Identity Innovation conference (pii2013) in downtown Seattle on September 17, 2013. The panel was entitled, “Emerging Technologies and the Fine Line between Cool and Creepy,” a topic I have written much about here in recent blog posts as well as in law review articles. The panel was expertly moderated by the awesome Natalie Fonseca, co-founder and executive producer of the pii2013 event as well as the always excellent Tech Policy Summit. Other panelists included Terence Craig, Co-founder and CEO, PatternBuilders and Co-author, Privacy and Big Data, Jamela Debelak, Technology and Liberty Director, ACLU of Washington, and my friend Larry Downes, Consultant and Author of The Laws of Disruption, among other excellent books. We discussed how to balance out the competing tensions surround new information technologies and stressed the various ways we could alleviate the primary concerns about many of them.
(The video, which is embedded down below, lasts just under 40 minutes. The audio is a little uneven because I was too stupid to keep the microphone close to my mouth. Sorry about that!)
Emerging Technologies and the Fine Line between Cool and Creepy from Privacy Identity Innovation on Vimeo.
Facebook announced some changes to its site today that will make it easier for teen users to share content with not just their friends but also the entire world. (More coverage at The Washington Post here.) No doubt, some privacy advocates will cry foul and rush to policymakers with requests for restrictions. Yet, it’s not clear to me what their case would be. There isn’t any COPPA issue here since we are talking about teens, and they aren’t covered by the law. Moreover, it seems entirely sensible to allow teens to make their voices heard more broadly via Facebook’s platform the same way they can via many other online sites and services. Teens have speech rights, too, after all.
On the other hand, this is another “teachable moment” that parents should take advantage of. When sites (especially larger sites like Facebook) change their policies and make it easier for our kids to share more about themselves and their feelings, that is always a great time to have another chat with them about acceptable online behavior. I’ve spent a lot of time here and elsewhere talking about the importance of “Netiquette,” or proper online etiquette in various social settings and situations. We need to talk to our kids and each other about being more savvy, sensible, respectful, and resilient media consumers and digital citizens. And schools and even governments have a role to play in pushing education and media literacy in pursuit of better “digital citizenship.”
The crucial lesson here — and this certainly has relevance to today’s Facebook announcement — is that we need to constantly be encouraging our kids to think about smarter online hygiene (sensible personal data use) and proper behavior toward others. Continue reading →
Oh man, I could not stop laughing at this old “Kids Guide to the Internet” video from the 90s. My thanks to my former colleague Amy Smorodin for tweeting it out today. I just had to post it here so that everyone could enjoy.
(Note: You can turn this video into a great drinking game. Just make everyone in the room raise their glass each time the lines “Does your computer have a modem?” and “Not all that cybernet stuff, OK?” are uttered.) And yes, as the opening line of the video notes, “the first thing you need to know about the Internet is that it is amazing.”
Michelle Quinn of Politico was kind enough to call me a few days ago and ask for comment for her story about “California Driving Internet Privacy Policy.” Quinn’s article offers an excellent overview of how the Golden State is gradually taking on a greater regulatory role for the Net, at least as it pertains to matters of online privacy. She opens by noting that:
With the federal government and technology policy shut down in Washington, California is steaming ahead with a series of online privacy laws that will have broad implications for Internet companies and consumers.In recent weeks, Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown has signed a litany of privacy-related legislation, including measures to create an “eraser button” for teens, outlaw online “revenge porn” and make Internet companies explain how they respond to consumer Do Not Track requests. The burst of activity is another sign that the Golden State — home to Google, Facebook and many of the world’s largest tech companies — is setting the agenda for Internet regulation at a time when the White House and Congress are moving at a much more glacial pace.
When she asked me how I felt about this, I noted that: “California seems like it is willing to declare the Internet its own private fiefdom and rule it with its own privacy fist.” And, no matter how well intentioned any of these new California policies may be, the ends most certainly do not justify the means. Continue reading →
California’s continuing effort to make the Internet their own digital fiefdom continued this week with Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation that creates an online “Eraser Button” just for minors. The law isn’t quite as sweeping as the seriously misguided “right to be forgotten” notion I’ve critique here (1, 2, 3, 4) and elsewhere (5, 6) before. In any event, the new California law will:
require the operator of an Internet Web site, online service, online application, or mobile application to permit a minor, who is a registered user of the operator’s Internet Web site, online service, online application, or mobile application, to remove, or to request and obtain removal of, content or information posted on the operator’s Internet Web site, service, or application by the minor, unless the content or information was posted by a 3rd party, any other provision of state or federal law requires the operator or 3rd party to maintain the content or information, or the operator anonymizes the content or information. The bill would require the operator to provide notice to a minor that the minor may remove the content or information, as specified.
As always, the very best of intentions motivate this proposal. There’s no doubt that some digital footprints left online by minors could come back to haunt them in the future, and that concern for their future reputation and privacy is the primary motivation for the measure. Alas, noble-minded laws like these often lead to many unintended consequences, and even some thorny constitutional issues. I’d be hard-pressed to do a better job of itemizing those potential problems than Eric Goldman, of Santa Clara University School of Law, and Stephen Balkam, Founder and CEO of the Family Online Safety Institute, have done in recent essays on the issue. Continue reading →
I’m excited to be attending the big annual Privacy Identity Innovation (pii2013) conference next week in Seattle, Washington from September 16-18. Organized by the amazing Natalie Fonseca, who also created the widely attended Tech Policy Summit, the Privacy Identity Innovation conference brings together some of the best and brightest minds involved in the digital economy and information technology policy.
Natalie and her team have put together another terrific agenda and group of all-star speakers to debate the “challenges associated with managing and securing the vast amounts of personal data being generated in our increasingly connected world” as well as the “huge opportunities for innovation if done properly.” There will be panels debating the implications of wearable technologies, Google Glass, government surveillance practices, digital advertising, transparency efforts, privacy by design, identification technologies and issues, and privacy developments in Europe and other countries, among other issues. The event also features workshops, demos, and other networking opportunities.
I’m looking forward to my panel on “Emerging Technologies and the Fine Line between Cool and Creepy.” That’s an issue I’ve had a lot to say about in blog posts here as well as recent law review articles. Occasional TLF contributor Larry Downes will also be on that panel with me.
Anyway, if you’ll be out there in Seattle for the big show, please make sure to find me and introduce yourself. I’ll be doing plenty of live-Tweeting from the event that you can read if you following me at (@AdamThierer) on Twitter.
Much of my recent research and writing has been focused on the contrast between “permissionless innovation” (the notion that innovation should generally be allowed by default) versus its antithesis, the “precautionary principle” (the idea that new innovations should be discouraged or even disallowed until their developers can prove that they won’t cause any harms). I have discussed this dichotomy in three recent law review articles, a couple of major agency filings, and several blog posts. Those essays are listed at the end of this post.
In this essay, I want to discuss a recent speech by Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chairwoman Edith Ramirez and show how precautionary principle thinking is increasingly creeping into modern information technology policy discussions, prompted by the various privacy concerns surrounding “big data” and the “Internet of Things” among other information innovations and digital developments.
First, let me recap the core argument I make in my recent articles and filings. It can be summarized as follows: Continue reading →
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