Today the Federal Trade Commission released a new report entitled, “Mobile Apps for Kids: Current Privacy Disclosures Are Disappointing,” which concludes that “confusing and hard-to-find disclosures do not give parents the control that they need in this area. The FTC argues that “parents need consistent, easily accessible, and recognizable disclosures regarding in-app purchase capabilities so that they can make informed decisions about whether to allow their children to use apps with such capabilities.”
It’s hard to be against the FTC’s “the more disclosure, the better” policy recommendation and I’m not about to come out against it here. But the question is:
how much disclosure is enough? Reading through the report and seeing how hard the FTC hammers this point home makes me think the agency wants our app store checkout process to be littered with the pages of fine print disclosure policies that now accompany our credit card statements and home mortgage payments! Seriously, would that make us better off?
As a parent of two kids who both download countless apps on my Android phone, my wife’s iPhone, and our family’s Android tablet, I appreciate a certain amount of disclosure about what sort of information apps are collecting and how they are using it. I think Google’s Android marketplace strikes a nice balance here, providing us with the most crucial facts about what the application will access or share. Apple could do more on disclosure but the company also prides itself (to the dismay of some!) on its rigorous pre-screening process to make sure the apps in the App Store are safe and don’t violate certain privacy and security policies. Yet, as the FTC correctly points out, “the details of this screening process are not clear.” Of course, most Apple users simply don’t give a damn. They’re all too happy to let Apple just take care of it for them even if they’re not really sure what’s happening to their data behind the scenes. The more privacy-sensitive crowd wants greater disclosure and control, of course, and I’m sympathetic to that plea. But again, how much disclosure is enough? Are you going to wade through pages of disclosure policies and privacy opt-ins before downloading that latest iteration of “Angry Birds” or “Cut the Rope”? Yeah, I didn’t think so.
Anyway, I don’t want to dwell on that. The more interested findings in the survey relate to price and market dynamics and I am hoping people don’t ignore them. Continue reading →
On NPR’s Marketplace this morning, I talk about net neutrality litigation with host John Moe.
Nearly a year after the FCC passed controversial new “Open Internet” rules by a 3-2 vote, the White House finally gave approval for the rules to be published last week, unleashing lawsuits from both supporters and detractors.
The supporters don’t have any hope or expectation of getting a court to make the rules more comprehensive. So why sue? When lawsuits challenging federal regulations are filed in multiple appellate courts, a lottery determines which court hears a consolidated appeal.
So lawsuits by net neutrality supporters are a procedural gimmick, an effort to take cases challenging the FCC’s authority out of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, which has already made clear the FCC has no legal basis here.
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For Forbes this morning, I reflect on the publication late last week of the FCC’s “Open Internet” or net neutrality rules and their impact on spectrum auctions past and future. Hint: not good.
An important study last year by Prof. Faulhaber and Prof. Farber, former chief economist and chief technologist, respectively, for the FCC, found that the last-minute imposition of net neutrality limits on the 700 MHz “C” block in the FCC’s 2008 auction reduced the winning bid by 60%–a few billion dollars for the Treasury.
Yet the FCC maintained in the December Report and Order approving similar rules for all broadband providers that the cost impact of these “prophylactic” rules would be minimal, because, after all, they simply endorse practices most providers already follow. (And the need for the new rules, then, came from where?)
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For CNET this morning, I offer five crucial corrections to the Protect IP Act, which was passed out of committee in the Senate back in May.
Yesterday, Rep. Bob Goodlatte, co-chair of the Congressional Internet Caucus, told a Silicon Valley audience that the House was working on its own version and would introduce it in the next few weeks.
Protect IP would extend efforts to combat copyright infringement and trademark abuse online, especially by websites registered outside the U.S.
Since Goodlatte promised the new bill would be “quite different” from the Senate version, I thought it a good time to get out my red pen and start crossing off the worst mistakes in policy and in drafting in Protect IP.
The full details are in the article, but in brief, here’s what I hope the House does in its version:
- Drop provisions that tamper with the DNS system in an effort to block U.S. access to banned sites.
- Drop provisions that tamper with search engines, indices, and any other linkage to banned sites.
- Remove a private right of action that would allow copyright and trademark holders to obtain court orders banning ad networks and financial transaction processors from doing business with banned sites.
- Scale back current enforcement abuses by the Department of Homeland Security under the existing PRO-IP Act of 2008.
- Focus the vague and overinclusive definition of the kind of websites that can be banned, limiting it to truly criminal enterprises.
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In my work critiquing the Lessig-Zittrain-Wu school of thinking–which fears the decline and fall of online “openness” and digital “generativity”–I have argued that, while there is no such thing as perfect “openness,” things are actually getting more open and generative all the time. All that really counts from my perspective is that we are witnessing healthy innovation across the generativity continuum.
Will some devices and platforms continue to be “closed”? Sure. Think Apple and cable set-top boxes. But (a) there’s a ton of innovation taking place on top of those supposedly “closed” platforms and (b) there are other options consumers can exercise if they don’t like those content /information delivery methods. [See this chapter from the Next Digital Decade book for my fuller critique.]
And, even if one adopts a rigid Zittrainian view of openness and generativity, each day seems to bring more good news. From that perspective it’s hard to find a better headline than this one: ”
Smartphone Makers Bow to Demands for More Openness.” That’s from ArsTechnica today and it refers to the fact that smartphone giant HTC just announced it would no longer attempt to lock the bootloader on its smartphones, meaning geeks like me can root and hack their devices to their heart’s content. As the Ars story notes:
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This morning, the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law had a hearing entitled: “Protecting Mobile Privacy: Your Smartphones, Tablets, Cell Phones and Your Privacy.” It was a remarkably scattered affair, and I blogged three key—and very distinct—elements of it on the Cato@Liberty blog:
- The Department of Justice used this “mobile privacy” hearing to call for increased surveillance of Internet and mobile phone users.
- To escape a prosecutorial dead-end, Senator Blumenthal (D-CT) strongly suggested that he would outlaw the collection of radio signals. Where this government power would lead is quite profound.
- Ignoring mobile privacy, Senator Schumer (D-NY) touted his hobby-horse, mobile app censorship.
Valid concerns with what mobile operating system providers Google and Apple have done with location information were somewhat lost in this disjointed and confused hearing.
I spaced out and completely forget to post a link here to my latest Forbes column which came out over the weekend. It’s a look at back at last week’s hullabaloo over “Apple, The iPhone, and a Locational Privacy Techno-Panic.” In it, I argue:
Some of the concerns raised about the retention of locational data are valid. But panic, prohibition and a “privacy precautionary principle” that would preemptively block technological innovation until government regulators give their blessings are not valid answers to these concerns. The struggle to conceptualize and protect privacy rights should be an evolutionary and experimental process, not one micro-managed at every turn by regulation.
I conclude the piece by noting that:
Public pressure and market norms also encourage companies to correct bone-headed mistakes like the locational info retained by Apple. But we shouldn’t expect less data collection or less “tracking” any time soon. Information powers the digital economy, and we must learn to assimilate new technology into our lives.
Read the rest here. And if you missed essay Larry Downes posted here on the same subject last week, make sure to check it out.
I’ve written a long article this morning for CNET (See “Privacy panic debate: Whose data is it?”) on the discovery of the iPhone location tracking file and the utterly predictable panic response that followed. Its life-cycle follows precisely the crisis model Adam Thierer has so frequently and eloquently traced, most recently here on TLF.
In particular, the CNET article takes a close and serious look at Richard Thaler’s column in Saturday’s New York Times, “Show us the data. (It’s ours, after all.)” Thaler uses the iPhone scare as occassion to propose a regulatory fix to the “problem” of users being unable to access in “computer-friendly form” copies of the information “collected on” them by merchants. Continue reading →
There’s a nice piece of reporting from Ian Shapira in today’s Washington Post entitled, “Once the Hobby of Tech Geeks, iPhone Jailbreaking Now a Lucrative Industry.” In the article, Shapira documents the rise of independent, unauthorized Apple apps (especially tethering apps) and points out that what was once a small black market has now turned into a booming, maturing business sector in its own right. In fact, Sharpia notes, there are already “market leaders” in the field:
At the top of the jailbreaking hierarchy sits Jay Freeman, 29, the founder and operator of Cydia, the biggest unofficial iPhone app store, which offers about 700 paid designs and other modifications out of about 30,000 others that are free. Based out of an office near Santa Barbara, Calif., Freeman said Cydia, launched in 2008, now earns about $250,000 after taxes in profit annually. He just hired his first full-time employee from Delicious, the Yahoo-owned bookmarking site, to improve Cydia’s design. “The whole point is to fight against the corporate overlord,” Freeman said. “This is grass-roots movement, and that’s what makes Cydia so interesting. Apple is this ivory tower, a controlled experience, and the thing that really bought people into jailbreaking is that it makes the experience theirs.”
In another sign this black market is now going mainstream, advertisers are apparently flocking to it:
In what might be the ultimate sign that the jailbreak industry is losing its anti-establishment character, Toyota recently offered a free program on Cydia’s store, promoting the company’s Scion sedan. Once installed, the car is displayed on the background of the iPhone home screen, and the iPhone icons are re-fashioned to look like the emblem on the front grill.
Interestingly, however, some people now complain that Cydia is getting too big for its britches and has come to be “as domineering as Apple is in the non-jailbreak world.” What delicious irony! Yet, I do not for one minute believe that Cydia has any sort of “lock” on the “unlocking” marketplace. This is an insanely dynamic sector that is subject to near-constant fits of disruptive technological change. Continue reading →
The New York Times
reports that, “Facebook is hoping to do something better and faster than any other technology start-up-turned-Internet superpower. Befriend Washington. Facebook has layered its executive, legal, policy and communications ranks with high-powered politicos from both parties, beefing up its firepower for future battles in Washington and beyond.” The article goes on to cite a variety of recent hires by Facebook, its new DC office, and its increased political giving.
This isn’t at all surprising and, in one sense, it’s almost impossible to argue with the logic of Facebook deciding to beef up its lobbying presence inside the Beltway. In fact, later in the
Times story we hear the same two traditional arguments trotted out for why Facebook must do so: (1) Because everyone’s doing it! and (2) You don’t want be Microsoft, do you? But I’m not so sure whether “normalizing relations” with Washington is such a good idea for Facebook or other major tech companies, and I’m certainly not persuaded by the logic of those two common refrains regarding why every tech company must rush to Washington.
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The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.