As anyone who has spent time searching for comments on the FCC’s website can tell you, the agency doesn’t exactly have the most user-friendly website. In the interest of making it easier for others to read the comments that came in last week in the agency’s “Child Safe Viewing Act” Notice of Inquiry, I have compiled all the major comments (those over 3 or 4 pages) and provided links to them below the fold.
Again, this proceeding was required under the “Child Safe Viewing Act of 2007,” which Congress passed last year and President Bush signed last December. The goal of the bill and the FCC’s proceeding (MB 09-26) is to study “advanced blocking technologies” that “may be appropriate across a wide variety of distribution platforms, including wired, wireless, and Internet platforms.” I filed 150+ pages worth of comments in this matter last week, and here’s my analysis of why this bill and the FCC’s proceeding are worth monitoring closely.
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Today I filed comments with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in its proceeding examining the marketplace for “advanced blocking technologies.” This proceeding was required under the “Child Safe Viewing Act of 2007,” which Congress passed last year and President Bush signed last December. The goal of the bill and the FCC’s proceeding (MB 09-26) is to study “advanced blocking technologies” that “may be appropriate across a wide variety of distribution platforms, including wired, wireless, and Internet platforms.” My colleagues will no doubt laugh about the fact that I have dropped an absurd 150 pages worth of comments on the FCC in this matter, but I had a lot to say on this topic! Parental controls, child safety, and free speech issues have been the focus of much of my research agenda over the past 10 years.
In my filing, I argue that the FCC should tread carefully in this matter since the agency has no authority over most of the media platforms and technologies described in the Commission’s recent Notice of Inquiry. Moreover, any related mandates or regulatory actions in in this area could diminish future innovation in this field and would violate the First Amendment rights of media creators and consumers alike. The other major conclusions of my filing are as follows:
- There exists an unprecedented abundance of parental control tools to help parents decide what constitutes acceptable media content in their homes and in the lives of their children.
- There is a trade-off between complexity and convenience for both tools and ratings, and no parental control tool is completely foolproof.
- Most homes have no need for parental control technologies because parents rely on other methods or there are no children in the home.
- The role of household media rules and methods is underappreciated and those rules have an important bearing on this debate.
- Parental control technologies work best in combination with educational efforts and parental involvement.
- The search for technological silver-bullets and “universal” solutions represent a quixotic, Holy Grail-like quest and it will destroy innovation in this marketplace.
- Enforcement of “household standards” made possible through use of parental controls and other methods negates the need for “community standards”-based content regulation.
My entire filing can be found here and down below in a Scribd reader. All comments in the matter are due tomorrow and then reply comments are due on May 18th.
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Earlier this month, Google made news when it announced that its cloud computing productivity suite Google Docs had suffered a technical glitch that temporarily compromised a subset of users’ shared documents. After becoming aware of this glitch, Google notified its users via email and posted an entry to the Official Google Docs Blog that offered a more detailed explanation of what happened.
It turns out that a bug in Google’s permissions code was causing certain documents that had been shared by their author with other users but subsequently unshared to remain visible to those users. By the time Google notified its users, the bug had already been resolved, and Google estimates that only around 0.05% of all documents were vulnerable due to the glitch. As to how many documents were actually viewed by unauthorized parties, it’s unclear at this point.
All in all, the Google Docs glitch, while troubling, seems relatively minor as far as bugs go. Nevertheless, the Electronic Privacy Information Center’s Mark Rotenberg jumped on the chance to attack Google, as he often does when Google makes news for anything privacy-related. Yesterday, EPIC filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission that called on the FTC to investigate Google’s privacy safeguards, order Google to shut down all cloud computing services—including Gmail, which has 26 million users—pending a thorough privacy evaluation, and force Google to pay $5 million to a fund that would be setup for “privacy research.”
Watchdog activist groups like EPIC can play a useful role in the public discourse on privacy, helping to publicize unsavory behavior by companies and educating consumers about keeping data secure. Unfortunately, however, these groups’ admirable focus on protecting privacy sometimes edges on the myopic, causing them to overreact to data breaches and sometimes even call for regulatory interventions that are decidedly
anti-consumer. EPIC’s latest complaint about Google is a classic example of this.
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As noted in the first installment of our “Privacy Solution Series,” we are outlining various user-empowerment or user “self-help” tools that allow Internet users to better protect their privacy online-and especially to defeat tracking for online behavioral advertising purposes. These tools and methods form an important part of a layered approach that we believe offers an effective alternative to government-mandated regulation of online privacy.
In the last installment, we covered the privacy features embedded in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) 8. This installment explores the privacy features in the Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox 3, both the current 3.0.7 version and the second beta for the next release, 3.5 (NOTE – The name for the next version of Firefox was just changed from 3.1 to 3.5 to reflect the large number of changes, but the beta is still named 3.1 Beta 2). We’ll make it clear which features are new to 3.1/3.5 and those which are shared with 3.0.7. Future installments will cover Google’s Chrome 1.0, Apple’s Safari 4, and some of the more useful privacy plug-ins for browsers . The availability and popularity of privacy plug-ins for Firefox such as AdBlock (which we discussed here), NoScript and Tor significantly augments the privacy management capabilities of Firefox beyond the capability currently baked into the browser. In evaluating the Web browsers, we examine:
(1)
cookie management;
(2)
private browsing; and
(3)
other privacy features
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I’ve already laid out my own reactions to Google’s roll-out of an “interest based advertising” (IBA) program here. In a nutshell, I applauded Google setting a new “gold standard” in user empowerment by providing:
- Notice in their IBA-targeted ads of who’s paying for the ad and the fact that Google is serving it; and
- A link to a powerful “Ad Preference Manager” that allows users to:
- See and modify the “digital dossier” (to use the fearmonger’s term) of interests associated with the cookie on their computer; and
- Opt-out of tracking for IBA purposes.
But as I predicted, despite these pro-privacy features (and despite the fact that other major companies such as Yahoo! and Microsoft already have IBA programs), a number of privacy advocacy organizations are attacking Google for daring to enter the IBA (or “online behavioral advertising”) business at all. I’ll have much more to say about the criticism of Google’s new Ad Preference Manager soon, especially coming from Marc Rotenberg of EPIC (a “disaster“) and Jeff Chester of CDD—precisely the sort of the “paroxysms of privacy hysteria” I predicted.
But first, the criticism from Ari Schwartz of the Center for Democracy & Technology requires a response today. At its best, CDT plays a vital role in calling corporations to continually raise the bar on privacy. My own think tank, the Progress & Freedom Foundation, works closely with CDT on many issues, such as advocating user empowerment through technological means as a constitutionally “less restrictive” way of protecting children than government censorship.
Here’s what Ari had to say: Continue reading →
Google’s new “Interest Based Advertising” (IBA) program represents the company’s first foray into what is generally called “Online Behavioral Advertising” (OBA): In order to deliver more relevant advertising, Google will begin tailoring ads delivered through AdSense on the Google Content Network (GCN) and YouTube.com (but not Google.com). This tailoring will be based on a profile of each user’s interests created by tracking their browsing activity across sites that use AdSense-but not search queries or other user information. Until now, (i) AdSense has delivered essentially “contextual” advertising by choosing which ad to display on a page based on an algorithmic analysis of keywords on that page; and (ii) Google has tracked users’ browsing only for analytics purposes-to limit the number of times a user sees a particular ad (to prevent overexposure) and to allow sequencing of ads in campaigns where one ad must follow another.
Google is sure to be attacked for crossing a “line in the sand” drawn by some privacy advocates between contextual and behavioral advertising-even though Google’s closest competitor, Yahoo!, already offers a similar program, and the concept in general is hardly new. Google’s position as the leading search engine and third party ad-delivery network will no doubt cause paroxysms of privacy hysteria among those who consider targeted advertising inherently invasive, unfair or manipulative.
But those whose first priority is advancing consumer privacy, not advancing a political or regulatory agenda, should applaud Google for excluding sensitive categories and for putting the new Ad Preference Manager at the core of the company’s new IBA program. The Ad Preference Manager sets a new “gold standard” for implementing the principles of Notice and Choice, which have formed the core of both OBA industry self-regulation and the various regulatory proposals made in recent years. Indeed, Google has done precisely what Adam Thierer and I have called for: giving consumers more granular control over their own privacy preferences by developing better tools.
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By Adam Thierer, Berin Szoka, & Adam Marcus
As noted in the first installment of our “Privacy Solution Series,” we are outlining various user-empowerment or user “self-help” tools that allow Internet users to better protect their privacy online-and especially to defeat tracking for online behavioral advertising purposes. These tools and methods form an important part of a layered approach that we believe offers an effective alternative to government-mandated regulation of online privacy.
In some of the upcoming installments we will be exploring the privacy controls embedded in the major web browsers consumers use today: Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) 8, the Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox 3, Google’s Chrome 1.0, and Apple’s Safari 4. In evaluating these browsers, we will examine three types of privacy features:
(1)
cookie management controls;
(2)
private browsing; and
(3)
other privacy features
We will first be focusing on the default features and functions embedded in the browsers. We plan to do subsequent installments on the various downloadable “add-ons” available for browsers, as we already did for AdBlock Plus in the second installment of this series. Continue reading →
I was reading this Sun Magazine interview with the always-interesting Nick Carr and I liked what he had to say here about the public’s inconsistent views on privacy:
If you ask people whether they’re concerned about the ability of the government or corporations to gather information about them online, they’ll say yes. But if you look at how they behave online, they don’t display much fear of exposing themselves. What that says about people — and it’s true for most of us — is that we will readily forgo our privacy in exchange for convenient and useful services, particularly if they’re free. That’s a trade-off you make all the time on the Internet. Even if people were more conscious of how this information might be exploited, I doubt most would change their behavior.
This reminds me of the classic “hamburgers for DNA” quip from security expert Bruce Schneier who once famously noted that:
If McDonalds in the United States would give away a free hamburger for an DNA sample they would be handing out free lunches around the clock. So people care about their privacy, but they don’t care to pay for it. In the United States we have frequent shopper cards, which will track down people’s purchases for a 5 cents discount on a can of tuna fish. I don’t think you can convince the public to care about it.
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Over at Computerworld, Ben Rothke makes the case for “Why Information Must Be Destroyed.” “Given the vast amount of paper and digital media that amasses over time,” he argues, “effective information destruction policies and practices are now a necessary part of doing business and will likely save organizations time, effort and heartache, legal costs as well as embarrassment and more.” He continues:
Every organization has data that needs to be destroyed. Besides taxes, what unites every business is that they possess highly sensitive information that should not be seen by unauthorized persons. While some documents can be destroyed minutes after printing, regulations may require others to be archived from a few years to permanently. But between these two ends of the scale, your organization can potentially have a large volume of hard copy data occupying space as a liability, both from a legal and information security perspective. Depending on how long you’ve been in business, the number of physical sites and the number of people you employ, it’s possible to have hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of pages of hard copy stored throughout your company — much of which is confidential data that can be destroyed.
He’s no doubt correct that it makes good business sense to routinely purge data — both physical and digital — to guard against theft, misplacement, leaks, abuse, or whatever else. Of course, in the context of digital information, there are many folks who would like to see digital records purged more frequently to avoid growing concerns about online privacy. I think most of those concerns are over-stated, but it can’t hurt to destroy most collected information after a certain period to play it safe and keep customers happy.
Problem is, as we discussed here last week, if some lawmakers in Washington get their way, it might be illegal to do that! Quite obviously, data retention mandates are at odds with data destruction efforts. [Mitch Wagner has more coverage of the data retention debate over at Information Week and he quotes my PFF colleague Sid Rosenzweig.]
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
