New York Times: Redrawing the Route to Online Privacy
The New York Times has a discussion about the history of online privacy (its focus on “notice and choice”) and thoughts for the future:
One prime candidate for the digital dustbin, it seems, is the current approach to protecting privacy on the Internet.
It is an artifact of the 1990s, intended as a light-touch policy to nurture innovation in an emerging industry. And its central concept is “notice and choice,” in which Web sites post notices of their privacy policies and users can then make choices about sites they frequent and the levels of privacy they prefer.
But policy and privacy experts agree that the relentless rise of Internet data harvesting has overrun the old approach of using lengthy written notices to safeguard privacy.
These statements are rarely read, are often confusing and can’t hope to capture the complexity of modern data-handling practices. As a result, experts say, consumers typically have little meaningful choice about the online use of their personal information — whether their birth dates, addresses, credit card numbers or Web-browsing habits. [...]
So if the current model is broken, how can it be fixed? There are two broad answers: rules and tools.
Rules would mean new regulations. And Congress and the Federal Trade Commission are looking at further rules that could limit how personal information is used. For example, the government might ban the use of recorded trails of a person’s Web-browsing behavior — so-called click streams — in employment or health insurance decisions. [...]
Whatever the future of regulation, better digital tools are needed. Enhancing online privacy is a daunting research challenge that involves not only computing, but also human behavior and perception. So researchers nationwide are tackling the issue in new ways.
At Carnegie Mellon University, a group is working on what it calls “privacy nudges.” [...]
An on-screen alert is a mild nudge. A stronger one might be automatically enrolling the user in an online lottery for cash prizes (perhaps financed by the industry, to avoid tougher privacy regulation), if the person doesn’t disclose potentially sensitive personal information.
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