Today’s Online Safety Technical Working Group (OSTWG) meeting included some heated debate about whether online intermediaries should be doing more to assist law enforcement to help track down child predators and those producing and distributing child pornography. (It’s not clear whether or when NTIA will actually put the archived video or a transcript online at this point).
Most interesting was the third panel of the day (agenda), which devolved into a shouting match as Dr. Frank Kardasz (resume) of the Arizona Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) Task Force basically accused Internet intermediaries of being willing accomplices in crimes of sexual abuse against children—and suggested that they could be charged as co-defendants in child porn prosecutions. A few industry folks in the room expressed their outrage at such slander. A retired law enforcement officer perhaps put it best when he said that he had never dealt with an ISP that didn’t sincerely want to help law enforcement stop this monstrous crime.
Apart from those pyrotechnics, and a superb morning presentation by the Pew Internet Project’s Amanda Lenhart about “Social Media & Young Adults,” the most interesting part of the day concerned data retention mandates. Even as a debate rages in Washington about how much collection and use of online data should be permitted, Dr. Kardasz suggested online service providers should be required to hold user data for 5 years. A number of attendees noted the staggering costs of such a mandate given the sheer volume of information shared every day by use, especially for startups for whom building monitoring and compliance infrastructure can be a significant barrier to entry. Of course, practical objections are always answered with practical counter-solutions—in this case, several attendees asked why we couldn’t just provide tax incentives or stimulus money to defray such costs. One attendee joked that we’d have to devote the entire state of Montana just to house all the necessary server farms.
But the strongest objection came from John Morris of the Center for Democracy & Technology, who rightly noted that no amount of government subsidies for data retention could prevent leakage of sensitive private data. For this reason and because of the basic civil liberties at stake whenever the government has access to large pools of data about its citizens, Morris argued that we need to strike a balance between how we protect children & the values of free society. Dave McClure of the US Internet Industry Association (USIIA) seconded this point powerfully: If such vast data is retained, it will be abused.
Then the riposte from advocates of data retention mandates: Aren’t online intermediaries already retaining huge amounts of consumer information? If they can do that, why can’t they retain the data we need to track down child predators and child porn distributors? Continue reading →
At today FTC’s “Exploring Privacy” roundtable event at Berkeley Law School, were heard a lunchtime address from Daniel J. Weitzner, Associate Administrator for Policy, National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) at the Department of Commerce. Down below is a brief summary of his remarks. (Berin Szoka and have been live-tweeting the event at @AdamThierer and @BerinSzoka). You can view all our tweets here.
Obama Administration is looking at nexus between privacy & innovation
Success of Internet has depended upon creative use of information
Predictability and certainty is imp for both consumers and companies on this front
Believes we CANhave both innovation and privacy protection; but there will be some tensions
Challenge of the 3rd decade of Internet policymaking = to get together set of policies to bring security to Net while preserving freedom
Does domestic & global patchwork of #privacy policies hurt or help innovation?
Need to take a hard look at the traditional notice & choice framework
Rules for COLLECTION or USE of data is key question
Concepts of “accountability” … to what or whom?
a Notice of Inquiry coming from NTIA about privacy to help shape privacy policy for Obama Admin
I’m attending the FTC’s 2nd “Exploring Privacy” roundtable event, which is taking place at the University of California-Berkeley School of Law. Here’s the agenda. (I’ll be live Tweeting @AdamThierer). FTC Commissioner Pamela Jones Harbour & FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection Director David Vladeck kicked things off. Here’s a quick summary of their remarks:
Data collection has vast opportunities but drawbacks also
“non-price dimensions” of privacy important
Talking about recent Facebook privacy changes
Privacy is not “over” as McNealy once said; recent public outcry about Facebook changes make that clear
“delicate balance” between data collection and consumer control
Concerned about privacy in the mobile environment
“Apple could do more to require baseline level of privacy disclosures”; other could set such defaults too
Similar fears about privacy in the cloud; difficult for consumers to define privacy expectation in the cloud; fear of lock-in concerns
Wants more data portability
Concerned that anonymization doesn’t work good enough; Perhaps our faith in current technologies is misplaced
Must address the question of privacy by design sooner rather than later
The Ticketmaster-Live Nation antitrust saga has come to a bittersweet end. Earlier this week the Justice Department finally approved the merger between the two firms, just shy of one year after it was announced.
While a number antitrust experts had speculated that the Justice Department might seek an injunction to block the deal outright, the DoJ ultimately opted to approve the deal while subjecting Ticketmaster-Live Nation to several conditions that are supposed to promote competition in the events marketplace. Under the terms of the consent decree, the combined firm will be required to license its ticketing software to competitor Anschutz Entertainment Group and divest Paciolan, a ticketing subsidiary of Ticketmaster. Ticketmaster-Live Nation also faces ten years of monitoring by antitrust officials to “prevent anticompetitive bundling of services.”
Ticketmaster has long been a controversial firm among concertgoers, frequently drawing consumers’ ire for charging hefty “convenience” fees and offering customer service that’s not exactly stellar. But it’s important to remember that today’s entertainment market is more fragmented than ever, and consumers have a huge array of choices for listening to music and viewing live events. Even YouTube is getting into the business of airing live events. The video site has broadcast several live events already, including U2’s Rose Bowl performance in October 2009, and is eyeing the pay-per-view live streaming market as well.
So it’s not hard to see why consolidation is taking place in the event ticketing and promotion markets. Economists have demonstrated that vertical integration, done properly, often results in sizable efficiencies, translating into overall welfare gains for consumers. Together, Ticketmaster and Live Nation are in a stronger position than before to offer value to event venues and promote concerts and shows. And as much we all hate service fees, in industries characterized by high fixed costs and declining marginal unit costs – like ticketing – big per-unit “markups” are often necessary to induce businesses to compete and innovate. While Ticketmaster may not be the most innovative company in the world, the firm faces an uncertain future as its contracts with venues come up for renewal. If Ticketmaster really is harming concertgoers – and by the way, there’s no clear evidence that it is – it will be disciplined not only by concert lovers, but by venues and artists as well. Derailing a potentially efficient business arrangement simply because it might not work out, whether in the event ticketing market or the cable television market, results in harm to consumers.
Berin Szoka and I will be in Berkeley, CA tomorrow attending the FTC’s 2nd “Exploring Privacy” roundtable event. The event will take place at the University of California-Berkeley School of Law. Here’s the agenda and speaker bios. The event will be webcast for those who cannot make it. But for those of you who going, make sure to come say hi to Berin and me. We were thinking about trying to get a group together afterward to grab a beer somewhere nearby.
At the “State of the Net” conference this morning, Alan Murray of The Wall Street Journal interviewed Brian Roberts, Chairman & CEO of Comcast. Here are some highlights. [You can follow all of my live Tweeting at: @AdamThierer]
Stresses synergies from combination of Comcast cable channels & NBC broadcast properties (ex: Golf Channel & NBC Sports)
Program access rules “should give fair amount of comfort” to critics who fear that content will be withheld
“Businesses have to transform & reinvent themselves all the time” NBC part of that transformation for Comcast
Internet is more friend than foe; broadband has transformed the business for the better
Businesses grappling w/ ways to extend traditional services to consumers in new ways & still make $$$ (ex: TV Everywhere)
There’s been a lot of hand-wringing lately about Google’s recent acquisitions of Teracent (ad-personalization) and AdMob (mobile ads), as well as Apple’s response, buying AdMob’s rivalQuattro Wireless. Jeff Chester, true To form, quickly fired off an angry letter to FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz, ranting about how the Google/AdMob deal would harm consumer privacy with the same vague fulminations as ever:
Google amasses a goldmine of data by tracking consumers’ behavior as they use its search engine and other online services. Combining this information with information collected by AdMob would give Google a massive amount of consumer data to exploit for its benefit.
Yup, that’s right, it’s all part of Google’s grand conspiracy to exploit (and eventually enslave) us all—and Apple is just a latecomer to this dastardly game. It’s not as if that data about users’ likely interests might, oh, I don’t know… actually help make advertising more relevant—and thus increase advertising revenues for the mobile applications/websites that depend on advertising revenues to make their business models work. No, of course not! Greedy capitalist scum like Google and Apple don’t care about anyone but themselves, and just want to extract every last drop of “surplus value” (as Marx taught us) from The Worker. (Never mind that in 4Q2009 Google generated $1.47 billion for website owners who use Google AdSense to sell ads on their sites—up 17% over 4Q2008—or that Apple has a strong incentive to maximize revenues for its iPhone app developers.) Internet users of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but all those “free” content and services thrown at your feet!Continue reading →
Stephanie Clifford of the New York Times posted a very interesting article this week summarizing a recent “on-the-record chat” the Times staff had with Federal Trade Commission (FTC) chairman Jon Leibowitz and FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection chief David Vladeck. The interview [discussed by Braden here] is profoundly important in that it reveals an alarming disconnect regarding the relationship between “privacy” regulation and the future of media, which were the subjects of their discussion with Times staff. Namely, Leibowitz and Vladeck apparently fail to appreciate how the delicate balance between commercial advertising and journalism is at risk precisely because of the sort of regulations they apparently are ready to adopt. Because the value of online advertising depends on data about its effectiveness and consumers’ likely interests, and because advertising is indispensable to funding media, what’s ultimately at stake here is nothing short of the future of press freedom.
The “Day of Reckoning” Is Upon Us
Leibowitz and Vladeck spend the first half of The Times interview wringing their hands about “privacy policies,” the declarations made by websites and advertising networks about their data collection and use practices (for which the FTC can and must hold them accountable). But the two feel that privacy policies don’t adequately inform consumers. Chairman Leibowitz claims that online companies “haven’t given consumers effective notice, so they can make effective choices.” And Mr. Vladeck states that advise-and-consent models “depended on the fiction that people were meaningfully giving consent.” But he and the FTC seem ready to abandon the notice and choice model because the “literature is clear” that few people read privacy policies, Vladeck told the Times. He and Leibowitz continue:
“Philosophically, we wonder if we’re moving to a post-disclosure era and what that would look like,” Mr. Vladeck said. “What’s the substitute for it?” He said the commission was still looking into the issue, but it hoped to have an answer by June or July, when it plans to publish a report on the subject. Mr. Leibowitz gave a hint as to what might be included: “I have a sense, and it’s still amorphous, that we might head toward opt-in,” Mr. Leibowitz said.
This clearly foreshadows the regulatory endgame we have long suspected was coming. When the FTC released its “Self-Regulatory Principles for Online Behavioral Advertising” eleven months ago, we asked: “What’s the Harm & Where Are We Heading?” Their answers to both questions have become clearer with each new calculated comment—all apparently intended to slowly “turn up the heat” on the advertising industry so that the proverbial frog will stay in the pot until the water finally boils. Leibowitz’s FTC has simply dodged the “harm” question with a four-part strategy: Continue reading →
Last year there was discussion of a possible return of the FCC’s “Fairness Doctrine” that used to apply to broadcasters. This year, we should all be aware of the FTC’s stepped-up rhetoric toward an “Unfairness Doctrine” for privacy–an increased effort toward enforcing the “unfair” part of Section 5 of the FTC Act, which prohibits unfair or deceptive practices.
Historically, the approach of the FTC toward privacy has been one of notice and consent and to hold companies to the word of their privacy policies — if companies say one thing and then do another, the FTC goes after them for being deceptive. This is the “deceptive” part of the FTC’s power to enforce the law against unfair or deceptive commercial practices.
For privacy, we really haven’t seen the “unfair” part being enforced. But if public comments from high-ranking officials is any indicator (and it is), that’s about to change.
A recent New York Times article summarizes its interview with FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz and David Vladeck, chief of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. It’s another insight into how aggressive the commission wants to be toward privacy.
Advise-and-consent “depended on the fiction that people were meaningfully giving consent,” Mr. Vladeck said. “The literature is clear” that few people read privacy policies, he said.
But even if people did read privacy policies, Vladeck still doesn’t think it is fair that people give consent to data practices, often in exchange for free services: Continue reading →
they will collaborate to help companies create and use new forms of digital signs. By exploiting Intel chips and Microsoft software, the companies hope to bring more interactivity to such devices and help retailers customized marketing offers to consumers.
Signs equipped with cameras and specialized software could recognize the age, gender and height of people in front of them, and tell what products and images received the most attention, the companies said. By gathering information about which messages are more effective, they add, traditional retailers could develop marketing approaches that better counter Web-based competitors. “Every year retailers lose more ground to online [sellers], and they have to do something about that,” said Joe Jensen, general manager of Intel’s embedded computing division.
Down below, I have jotted down a couple of thoughts about the rise of “digital signage” and more targeted forms of retail marketing, only a few of which I was able to get across in this short TV spot. I think it’s an exciting new development for both retailers and consumers for the reasons I explain down below:
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology. Learn more about TLF →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.