Multistakeholder Privacy Talks Slow to a Crawl
Privacy stakeholders failed to agree on any substantive issues related to mobile application transparency at the second NTIA multistakeholder meeting Wednesday. Too much time is being spent on the process negotiations, stakeholders said, and real progress was dogged by disagreements on the timing, location and even the fundamental structure of the talks. The group ended the talks by voting on more than two dozen items, including whether substantive matters should be considered at the next meeting.
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"No one thinks that anyone is going to come to final decisions or irreversible decisions on anything today or next Wednesday or potentially even in September,” said NTIA Director-Privacy Initiatives John Verdi. “What we think is that it is very difficult for a big group of stakeholders to address 80 potential elements at the same time and it is important for folks to decide what they will tackle first.” The next NTIA meeting is scheduled for 9:30 a.m. Aug. 29, though some stakeholders suggested the date be changed.
Susan Grant, Consumer Federation of America director-consumer protection, proposed to table the discussions on what elements should compose mobile application privacy guidelines in order to first come to an agreement on how the process of the negotiations should move forward. “We want to understand exactly how things are working,” she said. “We just simply don’t feel that we have the information to make a meaningful contribution to the question of the morning."
Stakeholders also decried the logistical headaches associated with the meeting, which they said hinder their ability to participate meaningfully. Some said the Wednesday meetings conflicted with separate World Wide Web Consortium and Do-Not-Track meetings scheduled for the same days. Others said the 9:30 a.m. EDT timing was too early for West Coast participants. Still others complained that the location of the meetings in an old auditorium at the Department of Commerce lacked sufficient wireless access and was burdensome to attend physically due to security restrictions. NTIA would like “nothing more” than for stakeholders to come to an agreement to change the dates of the meetings to something that is more agreeable, Verdi said.
Some stakeholders said the negotiations could be facilitated by an informal online forum where participants could discuss and circulate ideas and draft proposals outside of the meetings. “We'd like to see a lot of openness and we don’t want to only have to go through a formal working group,” said Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum. But Jerry Cerasale, senior vice president-government affairs at the Direct Marketing Association (DMA), said “suddenly opening up a working group” doesn’t work. Cerasale said he “totally disagreed” with Dixon’s idea because it would slow the process and would defeat “the dynamic of a smaller group trying to work together to get something done more quickly.” Ross Schulman, an attorney with the Computer and Communications Industry Association, said he has already helped establish an online forum with such an idea in mind at privacymsh.org.
Venable attorney Mike Signorelli urged stakeholders to first examine existing self-regulatory frameworks before considering new self-regulatory standards. Signorelli, who represents DMA and the Digital Advertising Alliance, said stakeholders would benefit from building upon existing transparency concepts from other organizations. In February, groups representing the largest online ad companies committed to implement do-not-track technologies into most major Web browsers to enable greater user control over online tracking (CD Feb 24 p1).