(Washington, DC) In the wake of the flap involving Facebook's Beacon program, which circulates information about a user's online purchases from third-party retailers to relevant Facebook friends, Internet privacy is coming under ever-increasing scrutiny. One discouraging conclusion from a panel of privacy experts at today's State of the Net conference is that it's almost impossible to keep putatively private data out of sight on the Internet.
FTC Commissioner Jon Leibowitz kicked off the discussion by noting that he's now a Facebook user and "I'm having a lot of fun with it." Regarding Facebook's Beacon program, which initially didn't allow but now allows users to opt-out of sharing personal purchase information with friends, Leibowitz said that "a true opt-in is almost aways preferable...but still Beacon is better that it was."
The FTC's guidelines regarding this kind of "behavioral advertising," released in late December (PDF here), stress that transparency to users, i.e. making sure users know what data is circulated to whom, "goes a long way" to redressing some privacy concerns, Leibowitz said.
That's all well and good, UC Berkeley's Danah Boyd said, but true transparency in a social context is rare because your friends have data about you that they may in turn share with others. "You don't necessarily have a good idea of how you've been 'outed' by the people around you," she said.
Facebook's Chief Privacy Officer Chris Kelly defended Facebook's efforts to protect privacy saying that society in general makes it inherently difficult to keep things private. "We've always erred on the side of giving you control, not perfect control, because that doesn't exist in the real world."
Privacy policies are almost worthless, GWU Law School professor Daniel Solove said. "The problem with privacy policies is that they're incredibly lengthy and burdensome [and can be unilaterally changed at any time]. No one I know has read that many privacy policies." When asked to address a particular aspect of Facebook's privacy policy, the FTC's Leibowitz generated chuckles in the audience when he said "I haven't looked at Facebook's privacy policy."
Santa Clara University Professor Eric Goldman said that Facebook ran into hot water with its Beacon program because it somehow smacked of unseemliness. "Facebook-Beacon had an undercurrent of trying to take advantage of our social networks."
GWU's Solove said that young people don't appreciate that information they post about themselves today will follow them for the rest of their lives. "They're going to have a lot of embarassing gossip and rumor swirling about them possibly for the rest of their lives."
One solution is to allow people to take data with them as they leave social networks in order to pull it out of circulation. Facebook, however, has rules that restrict the data users can take with them when they leave.
Facebook's Kelly said that those rules exist for users' protection. "It's very important to have rules about how that data gets taken. We don't want it to be the basis for spams and scams."
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 5:13 PM | Print | Comments (1)(Washington, DC) Unlike its fellow giant telco AT&T, Verizon has no interest in filtering its broadband customers' data streams to identify pirated video content, Verizon's top public policy executive said today. Speaking at the Congressional Internet Caucus' State of the Net conference, Tom Tauke, former congressman and current EVP of Public Affairs at Verizon said "we really don't want to play the role of policing the Internet" when asked whether Verizon shared AT&T's interest in helping Hollywood ferret out pirated content by implementing network level filters.
"We don't see ourselves as being a great arbiter" of what does and doesn't flow back and forth from its Internet customers, Tauke said. Verizon's hands-off policy might stem as much from self-interest as it does the public interest. Messing around with data streams invites all kinds of potential legal problems for the telco. "We are fearful of how you deploy these technologies [filters] without opening up a can of worms," he said.
Verizon's policy when it comes to text messaging, however, is different. The telco sparked an uproar last year when it initially refused to send out SMS messages sponsored by NARAL, the National Abortion Rights Action League, a decision Verizon quickly rescinded.
The NARAL controversy forced Verizon to engage in an internal review of the policies it applies to text messaging, Tauke said. "It did trigger a whole review within the company in terms of how we deal with these issues," he said, adding that this review is almost completed.
But Tauke rejected the notion that this kind of text messaging, which allows one company or organization to send out bulk text messages en masse to multiple phones, should be offered on a common carrier basis, available to anybody regardless of content. He cited a recent request Verizon had received from one company that sought to send out a text message soliciting mobile phone users to call a particular phone number. Calls to that number would have cost each mobile phone user $29.
If Verizon didn't exercise its discretion and had allowed the message sender to blast Verizon's mobile phone customer base, the "outcry" would have deafening, Tauke said. "We have to exercise some judgment in terms of the kinds of entities that want to use the service."
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 4:09 PM | Print | Comments (0)
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