Privacy Working Group

The Washington Post reports that Facebook is preparing to tackle the legislative process and policies in Washington. Former senior legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, Timothy Sparapani, has been hired as Facebook’s lead lobbyist to help define Internet-privacy legislation currently taking shape.

This comes at a time when Congress has sparked interest in creating new privacy legislation. Yesterday, lawmakers met and heard testimony on online advertising and the privacy concerns with tracking users. Congress has finally recognized the need for personal data protection on the Internet. Many providers and companies who gain from online advertising believe self regulation is the answer to privacy concerns as opposed to more laws that will quickly be out of date as technology grows.

Just when is government regulation necessary? Powerful lobbyists are sure to play a key role in shaping future legislation, and it remains to be seen which direction Facebook and other social networking sites move.

A “filtering software” recently introduced in China shows just how far the Chinese government is willing to go when it comes to censorship. The Chinese government has insisted on installing Green Dam software on every computer in China. Chinese officials claim the software is a “porn filter” but experts suggest otherwise.

The OpenNet Initiative – set up by Harvard, Cambridge, Oxford and the University of Toronto, released a report on Friday suggesting the software could be easily adapted to act as spyware. This would allow the software to monitor activities outside of Web browsing and even terminate applications.

As Chinese citizens have been able to explore the Internet rather freely thus far, most are condemning the transition. A survey of 26,232 people on Web portal Sina.com found that more than 80% of respondents did not support Green Dam. Some commented that educational information such as news stories and course materials is often blocked and no longer accessible to schools or teachers.

The Wall Street Journal reported that “No country in the world has gone to such great lengths to control online content as what China has proposed with Green Dam. Although questions remain about how it will be implemented, it appears to be one of the most intrusive filtering technologies ever mandated for use on a large scale. The great effort China puts into its censorship regime shows how much the Communist Party still fears online dialogue. But as the public backlash against this software shows, it can be very hard to shut down a flow of ideas once the dam has been opened.”

ITIF just released a report (download PDF) that looks at the history of the federal government policy on “cookies”—small data files stored on a user’s computer. We specifically look at the strict limitations put on the use of persistent cookies and how this has affected the development of government websites. The report surveys the 10 most popular government and non-government websites and their privacy policies. We also look at the growing importance of non-government websites to access government data, such as OpenSecrets.org used to access campaign finance data, rather than the government website FEC.gov. In the report, we call for a much more flexible privacy framework for government websites, one that allows the use cookies (and other similar technology like flash cookies and DOM storage objects). The goal should be to protect privacy, but not at the expense of other equally importantant goals for e-government like usability, transparency and accessibility.

The Wall Street Journal reports that a survey conducted by Deloitte reveals that business executives believe they should know what their employees are doing on social networking sites. Of managers surveyed 60% agree that the company has a right to know how employees are portraying their employers; 53% of employees surveyed disagreed with this assertion and many noted that they would be unlikely to change their behavior if they knew their activity was being monitored.

It is no secret that participation in social networking is rapidly increasing and businesses must respond to this shift in media; however, businesses must be mindful of their employees’ own personal rights while trying to find a balance. Creating or altering company policies to reflect current technology and trends will help alleviate the forthcoming issue of encroaching on employee privacy.

Does a company have the right to investigate an employee’s personal activities because of concerns about corporate branding?

A Fordham University law school professor does not believe there is enough privacy protection online. To prove the point he assigned his students a novel research project. This year’s students were challenged to create a dossier on the notoriously private Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia from publicly available information. Scalia was not amused.

ABC News reported that Professor Joel Reidenberg asked his students to compile any personal information they could find online about Justice Scalia. The students are said to have found such information as a home telephone number, his wife’s email address and pictures of his grandchildren. Justice Scalia was not pleased saying Reidenberg showed “abominably poor judgment”.

Reidenberg sought to prove the point that although there is often small bits of information about individuals on the Internet when all of those pieces are compiled it becomes a very thorough profile. Reidenberg adds that while personal information might have always been accessible it was through court records and town halls where the “effort and expense” of finding the information gave it protection.

The professor decided to pick Justice Scalia as the center of the project because of a speech the Justice gave earlier this year where he said that he was not bothered by the availability of personal information saying that he doesn’t “find that particularly offensive”.

Tell us what you think….did Reidenberg go too far?

There is nothing more private than a medical condition. People go to great lengths to keep their ailments private. Now, consider this, when the government takes over healthcare there is going to be a desire to keep tabs on people and store that information in a database. Any potential database could cost taxpayers millions, maybe even billions of dollars. Then there is the problem of security. How secure will a government database (or any database for that matter) be?

A May 4 Washington Post article may provide some insight in to potential problems with a database:

Hackers last week broke into a Virginia state Web site used by pharmacists to track prescription drug abuse. They deleted records on more than 8 million patients and replaced the site’s homepage with a ransom note demanding $10 million for the return of the records, according to a posting on Wikileaks.org, an online clearinghouse for leaked documents.

Wow, if this doesn’t make the hair on the back of your neck stand up nothing will. A national database of people and their ailments could be the scariest scenario possible.

While you may think that this is paranoia, consider what happened last year when State Department officials were snooping around the passport files of then Presidential candidates, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain. According to CBS News:

State Department workers pried into the supposedly secure passport files of presidential contenders Hillary Rodham Clinton, Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain, abashed officials admitted Friday in a revelation that had Condoleezza Rice telephoning the candidates to personally apologize.

The federal government needs to tread lightly as they consider gathering any information about American citizens.

An article on CIOL.com has indicated that the United Kingdom is abandoning a plan to monitor every cell phone call, e-mail, or website visit and store it in a national database:

The British government, which was planning to monitor every phone call, email or website visit and make a national database of the information, ditched the plan on Monday following the criticism from civil liberties groups, which termed the move as a ‘Big Brother’ style invasion of privacy.

The proposal was supposed to give police and security services the power to snoop on every single communication made by the public with the data then likely to be stored in an enormous national database.

Following the criticism, British Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said on Monday the plan had been dropped, as the government “recognizes the privacy implications” of a database and “does not propose to pursue this approach.”

Unfortunately, with every piece of good news comes some bad news. According to the same article:

Instead, the government would ask the service providers to store and organize information of every electronic communication made by Britons. According to the estimates of the Home Office, introducing the new system would cost up to $3 billion.

The government said providers would not store the content of calls, e-mails or Internet use. They would store the details of times, dates, phone numbers, e-mail addresses and Web site URLs.

Even though this is a step in the right direction, there is still plenty of work to do to ensure that people’s privacy is protected. I wonder if there is any chance that the U.S. government can learn from the mistakes of our friends from across the ocean.

As Robert Frost once penned:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

The same can be said for making sure government protects everybody’s privacy.