I was going to write a nice long review of the President’s new privacy initiative released last week. But then I found Ryan Singel’s article on Wired.com and realized everything I wanted to write was already covered. Just head over there now and read the story. You’ll thank me.
White House Privacy Bill of Rights Brought to You by Years of Online Debacles
As for my take on the issue, I certainly think it’s a step in the right direction. As some of the commenters on the article pointed out, the policy is heavily tilted toward business interests. The goal is to move US policies toward those in European countries, since theirs are far more strict and protective of users’ privacy, which would make things easier for companies to engage in trans-Atlantic commerce. It certainly would give the government more power to punish companies who violate or radically change their privacy policies compared with the present toothless system. Rather than put up with the relentless bait-and-switch tactics to get our data that we deal with regularly from Facebook and Google, consumers will be hopefully be able to rely on the Do Not Track features to give themselves at least a modicum of seclusion from endless data profiling. I’m looking forward to see what emerges as the FCC and FTC revise their regulations. At long last, we finally have a dog in this fight.
