Industry Privacy Solutions Still Evolving, Says FTC’s Brill
It’s “too soon to tell” if industry-based “do not track" solutions like Microsoft and Mozilla’s new browsers will satisfy FTC requirements, Commissioner Julie Brill told an American Bar Association antitrust conference Thursday. She said the agency expects to release a final privacy report by the end of the year. Google and other industry players discussed ways they're implementing privacy-by-design frameworks into their business models.
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The FTC’s settlement with Google over privacy violations in its Buzz service (WID March 31 p3) got scant mention except in a pun. “Do not track has obviously generated a great deal of buzz,” Brill quipped, apologizing to Google Competition Counsel Matthew Bye, who served as panel co-moderator.
The FTC will evaluate the value of industry privacy solutions by their universality, ease of use, universal adoption, consistent choice options, and the effectiveness of their enforcement mechanisms, said Brill. Following several of the agency’s roundtable discussions, the commission believes there’s a vast amount of information on consumers which most of them know nothing about, she said. Privacy notices are too “legalistic” and put too much burden on consumers, she said. “The FTC is well suited to consider the appropriate balance between ‘do not track’ and industry competition concerns."
Data tracking offers some benefits for consumers and is responsible for funding free information on the Web, “but there are other uses that are more pernicious,” Brill said. She’s particularly concerned about mechanisms that can take anonymized information and reassociate it with consumers, she said. “The distinction between personally identifiable information and non-personally identifiable information is clearly blurring.”
Data tracking allows Google to “fight off the bad guys,” something that’s beneficial to consumers, said Google Product Manager Jonathan McPhie. The company uses browsing data to identify problems like click fraud, where a person or program repeatedly clicks online ads to intentionally generate false marketing results, McPhie said. Google can analyze this type of behavior through data tracking and can prevent “bad agents from degrading the experience of users in the system,” said McPhie.
Data tracking can help Google make the experience better by helping it build better products like Google’s personalized search, McPhie said. The company also offers privacy products to its consumers, like an opt-out mechanism in the Google dashboard, he said. Google helps export their data completely through its Data Liberation Front service. (See related story in this issue.) “Our firm goal is to make every Google product and service this easy to export,” said McPhie. “We want to make privacy more successful."
Other search companies are going a step further and committing to end data tracking altogether. David Bodnick, founder of Startpage, said it offers an alternative search engine that does not collect users information at all. The service offers anonymous searching by securing user searches with SSL certificates. Startpage also employs proxy servers to prevent websites from placing cookies or malware on users’ computers, he said.
The key ingredient of building a privacy framework is incorporating a measure of accountability, said Harvey Jang, a privacy attorney at Hewlett-Packard. “If we say we are going to do something, we better do it.” HP addresses privacy by first demonstrating to internal stakeholders that they are able to implement their privacy policies and are compliant with them. Then they show their external stakeholders that they have the correct policies and programs and are compliant with them. “We have to make sure we are honoring our promises,” said Jang.