Hill Has Privacy Front and Center, but for Talk Only, Says Sprint
SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Congress will keep holding hearings about privacy about every couple of weeks into December at least, but it won’t pass a scrap of legislation, said Maureen Cooney, the director of Sprint’s privacy office. “Privacy is one of the hot-button issues on the legislative agenda,” but “it’s very unlikely -- very unlikely -- we'll have new privacy legislation,” she said last week at the Sprint Open Solutions Conference for developers.
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Privacy has been “historically nonpartisan” in Congress, Cooney said. But now “things are so fractured” that “we can’t even get consensus” on as vanilla a matter as data security, she said. That doesn’t slow the “constant congressional hearings on a variety of hot topics,” however, Cooney said: whether the U.S. should have an “overarching privacy law,” tracking of user behavior across websites and the behavioral advertising it’s used for, mobile location and app privacy, protecting children, and data breach and “leakage.” Mobile and children are “the two hot-button topics this year, and they've been very much coupled together,” she said.
The real action is at the FTC and in the states, Cooney said. The FTC’s creation of a mobile lab and team signal its investment in future consumer-protection enforcement, she said. “State legislatures and the FTC are looking at ways to more broadly define ‘harm'” as an element of proving privacy-infringement liability, Cooney said. The traditional requirement of showing that a complainant has suffered concrete financial harm has been a barrier to enforcement, she said.
The office of California’s attorney general has been “making quiet inquiries” of mobile-app companies about whether they're imposing privacy requirements on developers, Cooney said. A spokeswoman for Attorney General Kamala Harris, a Democrat, would say only that the official “is very interested in new technology and what it means for consumers” in the state.
Dave Deasy, TRUSTe’s marketing vice president, talked up the marketing industry’s Advertising Option Icon, a self-regulatory program featuring a lower-case I in a triangle appearing in Web ads to offer readers information about behavioral ads and the opportunity to opt out. The “rather low” opt-out rates -- “around 1/100th of a percent” -- in the program’s early months should ease fears in the industry that offering choice would kill behavioral ads, he said. And the program is showing that “transparency around targeted advertising” improves consumers’ attitude toward it “and in many cases, gives them more confidence” in online marketing, Deasy said. But Jim Brock, founder of PrivacyChoice, said consumers’ use of the program is much lower than their use of do-not-track options in browsers and the FTC will have to evaluate the disparity in deciding on the adequacy of the effort in protecting Web surfers. “This is unfinished business,” he said.