Thursday NTIA Meeting to Focus on Short-Form Notice Draft
Mobile privacy stakeholders may soon have a voluntary code of conduct on mobile applications’ use of short-form notices to inform users how their data are collected and used. Stakeholders participating in the NTIA mobile privacy discussions, including members of the mobile application and online advertising industries as well as civil liberties and consumer advocates, will meet Thursday to discuss the most recent discussion draft of the voluntary code of conduct put forth by a group including the Application Developers Alliance, ACLU, Consumer Action and World Privacy Forum (http://xrl.us/boa4g9).
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This draft could be finalized in the coming weeks, stakeholders told us. “This is moving forward,” said Jim Halpert, technology lawyer with DLA Piper and general counsel for the Internet Commerce Coalition. “I would hope it wraps up in February,” he continued. The code’s drafters told us that the progress of this draft is encouraging and suggested that the code could be finalized in the next few weeks.
Due to the diverse group of authors, the draft has an impressive consensus, said Tim Sparapani, one of the authors and vice president of law, policy and government relations at the Application Developers Alliance. The alliance represents the people who would have to actually adopt this code, Sparapani said, pointing to the alliance’s members, including more than 20,000 individual developers and 100 companies. Stu Ingis, privacy lawyer at Venable and counsel to the Direct Marketing Association (DMA), told us the draft had “apparent consensus” but did not reflect the online advertising industry perspective. “We know who represents industry. It’s not [the drafters],” he said. While he disagreed with parts of the document, including the guiding principles in the preamble, he said the industry could support the “narrower set of principles” the document lays out. “There’s nothing in there that we have any problems with,” he said about the sections requiring adopters to notify users about how information is collected and shared. “The DMA standards are stronger."
"There’s work to be done” on the definitions added to the new draft of the code, Halpert said. The code includes a section on third-party data sharing, requiring apps to tell users when information is shared with third parties. That list now includes definitions for the third parties, including one for “affiliated businesses,” which are “businesses that control, are controlled by, or are under common control with another business.” That definition will be “the issue for the business community that’s going to be the hardest to swallow in this draft,” Halpert said. Some stakeholders will be concerned that the definition overlaps with other categories of third parties, he said. The draft’s new definition of data brokers -- “companies that buy and sell personally identifiable information to other companies” -- will also be “a big issue,” Halpert said. The new draft would also require adopters to notify users when they collect age information, an addition participants expected to be debated during Thursday’s meeting.
Stakeholders disagree over the placement of the preamble, which lays out the principles behind the code of conduct. Some “question whether the preamble really belongs in the document,” Halpert said. Ingis called the preamble a “manifesto” and said it’s unlikely the stakeholders will all agree on its content and placement in the code. The code’s drafters are unlikely to yield on the placement of the preamble, Sparapani told us. Though the statement of principles doesn’t create any requirements for the voluntary code’s adopters, it’s necessary to lay out context, he said, likening it to the “Findings” section of a piece of legislation.