I'm attending the FTC's 2nd "Exploring Privacy" roundtable event, which is taking place at the University of California-Berkeley School of Law. Here's the agenda. (I'll be live Tweeting @AdamThierer). FTC Commissioner Pamela Jones Harbour & FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection Director David Vladeck kicked things off. Here's a quick summary of their remarks:
- Data collection has vast opportunities but drawbacks also
- "non-price dimensions" of privacy important
- Talking about recent Facebook privacy changes
- Privacy is not "over" as McNealy once said; recent public outcry about Facebook changes make that clear
- "delicate balance" between data collection and consumer control
- Concerned about privacy in the mobile environment
- "Apple could do more to require baseline level of privacy disclosures"; other could set such defaults too
- Similar fears about privacy in the cloud; difficult for consumers to define privacy expectation in the cloud; fear of lock-in concerns
- Wants more data portability
- Concerned that anonymization doesn't work good enough; Perhaps our faith in current technologies is misplaced
- Must address the question of privacy by design sooner rather than later
David Vladeck, Director, Bureau of Consumer Protection, FTC
- Discusses lessons from FTC December workshop...
- Consumers have little understanding of data collection practices, both offline & online
- Privacy policies written by lawyers not effective communications tools for consumers
- Consumers uncomfortable with behavior advertising
- AdBlock Plus is most popular Firefox download
- #1 most emailed article on New York Times recently was about how consumers can protect privacy on Facebook
- We should encourage more technological innovation to empower people to do what they want to do and learn about data
- Technology raises public policy concerns, however
- "a troubling technological arms race" between consumer empowerment tools and technologies that allow greater data collection
- New concerns about social networking, mobile environment, location-based services;
- How well do disclosure policies work on small mobile screens?
- Need to bake-in privacy upfront