In the News: MediaPost Reports on Filing by Coalition Including Privacy Lives
On Friday, Privacy Lives joined eight groups in filing comments (pdf) to the Federal Communications Commission in response to a public notice (pdf) in which the agency sought comments on “on the use of personal information, identity management services, and privacy protection against broadband applications.” The groups urged the FCC to consider all avenues it may use to protect consumers, “including exercising its ancillary jurisdiction to address broadband privacy issues, and working with Congress and the Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”), which has substantial expertise in consumer privacy protection.”
MediaPost includes the groups’ filing in a story about a filing by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (the online marketing industry’s principal trade and lobbying group) that urges the FCC against addressing privacy questions as part of the agency’s broadband plan.
“IAB believes that regulation by the commission, or potentially conflicting regulations from multiple government agencies, could stifle the Internet,” the trade group said in a letter to the FCC. “Existing robust self-regulatory principles provide consumers with strong protections in a manner that has allowed the Internet to thrive, thereby benefiting the U.S. economy.” [...]
The group reiterated its stance that Web companies can protect consumers’ privacy by complying with self-regulatory principles. “Unlike formal regulations, which can become quickly outdated in the face of evolving technologies, self-regulation provides industry with a nimble way of responding to new challenges presented by the evolving Internet ecosystem,” states the letter, which was signed by IAB Vice President for Public Policy Mike Zaneis. [...]
Privacy advocates have been pressing for new laws to require companies to obtain consumers’ consent before tracking them online for ad purposes. A coalition of nine consumer groups — including the ACLU, Center for Digital Democracy, Consumer Federation of America, and U.S. Public Interest Research Group — filed their own papers with the FCC Friday arguing that self-regulation by the online ad industry will not protect users’ privacy. [...]
The privacy advocates are asking the FCC to base online privacy protections on the Fair Information Practices standards set out in 1973 by the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare.
In our comments, we explained, “The FCC should not rely on industry self-regulatory models because they do not adequately protect consumer privacy.” For example, “the marketing industry continues to hide behind the cloak of data ‘anonymization’ or ‘de-identification,’ stating that this protects consumer privacy while allowing companies to build profiles on consumers. However, as we explain below, it has proved relatively easy to link anonymized or de-identified data back to personally identifiable information of individuals.”
We noted researcher Latanya Sweeney’s work: “In 2000, Sweeney found that 87 percent of the U.S. population could be identified with birth date, gender and zip code. She used 1990 Census data. In 2006, Philippe Golle at the Palo Alto Research Center revisited her research, using 2000 Census data, and found that ‘disclosing one’s gender, ZIP code and full date of birth allows for unique identification,” allowing the identity of 63 percent of the U.S. population to be revealed. We also wrote:
In 2006, the publication of search records of 658,000 Americans by AOL demonstrated that the storage of a number as opposed to a name or address does not necessarily mean that search data cannot be linked back to an individual. Though the search logs released by AOL had been “anonymized,” identifying the user by only a number, New York Times reporters were quickly able to match some user numbers with the correct individuals. User No. 4417749 “conducted hundreds of searches over a three-month period on topics ranging from ‘numb fingers’ to ‘60 single men’ to ‘dog that urinates on everything.’” A short investigation led Times reporters to “Thelma Arnold, a 62-year-old widow who lives in Lilburn, Ga.” and has three dogs.
Two days after the groups’ filing, the Guardian published a story, “Fraud fears as scientists crack ‘anonymous’ datasets,” which raises questions about the efficacy of data anonymization procedures.
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