In case you missed it, Saturday Night Live recently mocked the news media’s habit of inciting techno-panics (and any other panic they can).
Enjoy. After the fear-inspiring ad…
Articles by Jim Harper 
Jim is the Director of Information Policy Studies at The Cato Institute, the Editor of Web-based privacy think-tank Privacilla.org, and the Webmaster of WashingtonWatch.com. Prior to becoming a policy analyst, Jim served as counsel to committees in both the House and Senate.
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I was struck by the absurd title of a New York Post story from yesterday: Is Your Restaurant Spying on You? Some restaurants are—shocker—making note of your preferences and your qualities as a customer, for good or bad. That’s “spying”?
Of course, headlines are meant to catch attention. The story illustrates a phenomenon that will continue to proliferate, and that will probably continue to raise hackles, classed as “spying”, “privacy invasion”, “dossier building”, and such. People and businesses are more able to capture information about each other than they were before. (It is a two-way street. We consumers know more about businesses, and businesses know more about us.)
That’s a big change from the recent past. Over the past century or so, people got more mobile and thus less amenable to consistent observation—which means less amenable to being affixed with a reputation. Now information systems are catching up. What kind of person you are—a good tipper, a brusque faux gastronome—that information might precede you to a restaurant. Object to it. Call it what you want. But you might also consider getting used to it, tipping better, and being polite.
None of this is a comment on what our public policies should be. They should neither favor this cultural change nor fight it. People need to understand what happens with information about them, and they should be able to withhold information if they want, though that may be hard for privacy outliers to do.
As a student of information, I find it hard to accept that a restaurant noting the information you’ve made available to it is “spying.”
Advocates of regulation will credit regulators for the fact that major browser providers Microsoft and Mozilla are going after online “tracking.” In forthcoming versions of their browsers, they will provide controls that protect against unwanted monitoring even better than the controls that now exist.
When consumer advocates cluster in Washington, D.C., asking federal agencies to solve consumer issues, of course, any progress on the issues will be credited to the threat of coercion. But experiments like these have no controls.
Decisions about the qualities of goods and services are made out at the leading edge of consumer demand, where producers work to anticipate developing public interests. Meeting demand after it has been realized is a recipe for business failure because competitors getting there before the others win market share and profits. Laggards are losers.
You can tell when regulators push for something that does not match up with consumer demand as perceived in the business sector. The regulators get nowhere. That would be the FTC’s call a decade ago for a suite of regulations requiring “notice, choice, access, and security.” The current push for “tracking” controls does appear to meet up with consumer demand, and, again, the browser providers are working on it years ahead of what any regulation would have required.
I’ve put “tracking” in scare quotes because the open question is just what anyone means by the word. The report linked above notes a comment from Google, provider of the Chrome browser:
“The idea of ‘Do Not Track’ is interesting, but there doesn’t seem to be consensus on what ‘tracking’ really means, nor how new proposals could be implemented in a way that respects people’s current privacy controls,” said the company…
Maybe Google will be the laggard and loser for not moving on “tracking” as fast as its competitors. That’s one approach, while Microsoft and Mozilla will each take a different tack to the problem. The result will be an experiment that does have controls. The browser provider that meets up with consumer interests, in the consumer-friendliest way, wins. Such would not be the case if a federal regulation—yes, one-size-fits-all—determined what “tracking” was and how browsers or others would provide protection against it.
Marketplace competition will do better than any other known method for determining what “tracking” means to consumers and what to do about it. There is no privacy advocate, there is no technologist, no advocacy group, nor academic who knows what to do here.
The one thing I recommend is that do-not-track efforts should control the content of the header and the domains the browser communicates with. Simply putting a “do-not-track” signal in the header would punt the problem back to regulators and the cadre that surrounds them. This group would come up with something that satisfies itself, the regulatory community, but that does not digest and reconcile actual consumers’ competing interests in privacy, convenience, access to content, and so on.
Deep in this Washington Post story on dynamic pricing—prices that change based on what online retailers know or guess about individual customers—come these lines:
[A]s much as retailers try to foil bargain shoppers, consumers do hold the upper hand online. Dynamic pricing is easy to counteract. Search multiple sites – including ones that collect prices from across the Internet as well as the sites themselves. Run searches on more than one browser, including one which you have erased cookies. Leave items in a shopping cart for a few days to gin up discount offers.
That makes the rest of the story, and wafting consumer protection concerns with dynamic pricing, a little humdrum. Indeed, it belies the headline: “How Online Retailers Stay a Step Ahead of Comparison Shoppers.”
Even better advice—certainly the simplest—is: Don’t buy what you can’t afford. That is serious consumer protection.
This morning, a database of FY 2011 earmark requests was released by Taxpayers Against Earmarks, Taxpayers for Common Sense, and my own WashingtonWatch.com. With House Republicans generally eschewing earmarks this year, members of Congress and senators still sought over 39,000 earmarks, valued at over $130 billion dollars. Learn more on the relevant pages at Taxpayers for Common Sense, Taxpayers Against Earmarks, and WashingtonWatch.com.
This is transparency. The production of organized, machine-readable data has allowed these differing groups—an advocacy organization, a spending analysis group, and a “Web 2.0” transparency site—to expand the discussion about earmarks. The data is available to any group, to the press, and to political scientists and researchers.
Earmarking is a questionable practice, and, anticipating public scrutiny, House and Senate Republicans have determined to eschew earmarks for the time being. But the earmark requests in this database are still very much “live.” They could be approved in whatever spending legislation Congress passes for the 2011 fiscal year. They also tell us how our representatives acted before they got careful about earmarks.
Earmarks are a small corner of the federal policy process, of course, but when all legislation, budgeting, spending, and regulation has become more transparent—truly transparent, Senator Durbin—the public’s oversight of Congress will be much, much better. As I noted at the December 2008 Cato Institute conference, “Just Give Us the Data,” progressives believe that it would validate government programs and root out corruption. (That’s fine—corruption and ongoing failure in federal programs are not preferable.) I believe that demand for government will drop. The average American family pays about $100 per day for the operation of the federal government currently. That’s a lot.
Again, you can see how this data is in use, and you can use it yourself, by visiting Taxpayers for Common Sense, Taxpayers Against Earmarks, and WashingtonWatch.com. On the latter site, you can see a map of earmarks in your state and lists of earmarks by member of Congress and representative, then vote and comment on individual earmarks.
At considerable expense and effort, these sites have done what President Obama asked Congress to do in January. If earmarking is to continue, Congress could produce earmark data as a matter of course itself: The appropriations committees could take earmark requests online and immediately publish them, rather than using the opaque exchange of letters, phone calls, and—who knows—homing pigeons.
Congress should modernize and make itself more transparent. We’re showing the way.
The ACLU of Northern California says it’s time for a privacy check-in on location based-services. Their handy chart compares several of the most popular location-based services along a number of dimensions.
Little of what they examine has to do with civil liberties—cough, cough, ahem (this is a favorite critique of mine for my ACLU friends)—but the report does find that five out of six location-based providers are unclear about whether they require a warrant before handing information over to the government. Facebook is the winner here. Yelp, Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, and Twitter are unclear about whether they protect your location data from government prying.
As he noted, Adam Thierer’s lead article in the most recent Cato Policy Report is called “The Sad State of Cyber-Politics.” It goes through so many ways tech and telecom companies are playing the Washington game to win or keep competitive advantage.
It’s a nice set-up to a Washington Post opinion piece from this weekend in which TownFlier CEO Morris Panner talks about the growing riches accruing to Washington influencers:
We are creating so much regulation – over tax policy, health care, financial activity – that smart people have figured out that they can get rich faster and more easily by manipulating rules on behalf of existing corporations than by creating net new activity and wealth. Gamesmanship pays better than entrepreneurship.
Thierer sees some hope for the tech sector, for a few reasons:
Smaller tech companies have thus far largely resisted the urge [to engage with Washington]. Hopefully that’s for principled reasons, not just due to a shortage of lobbying resources. Second, the esoteric nature of many Internet and digital technology policy discussions frustrates many lawmakers and often forces them to lose interest in these topics. Third, the breakneck pace of technological change makes it difficult for regulators to bottle up innovation and entrepreneurialism.
Panner’s broader piece calls for “a national campaign to create transparency in our legislation and a national moratorium on the creation of commissions, regulators and czars. It is time for Congress to do the hard job of saying what lawmakers mean in clear and easy-to-understand language.” He continues, “We should reject bills that are thousands of pages or that delegate vast authority to unelected regulators.”
That would be a start.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.