WASHINGTON – As private companies like Google and Facebook expand their offerings of personalized experiences, those conveniences — syncing your address book with your Facebook contacts, providing word suggestions when texting, even gearing specific advertisements during commercials — are often taken for granted.
The Founding Fathers, however, had no way of anticipating the rapid growth of technology. Therefore, technological innovation — and the data gathered from such innovation — has outpaced the law.
Now, the White House is attempting to catch up with the exponential pace of private data collection with last week’s introduction of the “Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights.”
The Obama administration presented the blueprint for legislators and companies to agree on how to protect individual privacy rights and give users more control over how their data is collected, shared, and used. It would also provide users the chance to access and correct their data.
“For businesses to succeed online, consumers must feel secure,” President Barack Obama said in a statement. “By following this blueprint, companies, consumer advocates and policymakers can help protect consumers and ensure the Internet remains a platform for innovation and economic growth.”
It pushes for more transparency from private companies — some of whom use consumer data without consumers’ knowledge to present a more personalized experience or advertisement. Last year, two scientists found that Apple collected and stored 10 months worth of geological data from iPhones, iPads and iPod Touch devices to improve location services.
The initiative calls for browsers to have a “Do Not Track” option in case consumers prefer that their data not be tracked Companies recpresenting sites that host nearly 90 percent of online behavioral advertisements — such as Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and AOL — have already made their commitment to the technology.
In Google’s public policy blog, Susan Wojcicki, senior vice president of advertising, wrote that while the agreement would not solve all the privacy issues on the web today, the Obama proposal represents a meaningful step forward in shifting digital privacy controls to users.
Jeff Chester, executive director at the Center for Digital Democracy, told NPR’s Steve Henn that companies like Facebook and Google are worried the European privacy policy, which requires greater consumer control over data, will become the dominant privacy standard.
Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., wrote in an op-ed on Wired’s Epicenter blog that the United States has a long way to go before modern privacy laws are in line with modern technology. He said he would push his colleagues to do whatever it takes to protect American consumers.
“I believe that consumers have a fundamental right to know what information is being collected about them,” Franken wrote. “I believe that they have a right to decide whether they want to share that information, and with whom they want to share it and when. And I believe that consumers have a right to expect that companies that store their personal information will store it securely.”
As the Internet evolves, Obama said, consumer trust is needed to spurn digital economic growth. The proposal suggests that private companies must provide clearer information into how they use data and how secure that data will be.
The timing is almost perfect; the administration’s proposal aligns with Google’s new streamlined privacy policy, which provides a more transparent look at how Google uses data across all of its 60 services, including Gmail, Google+ or YouTube, to tailor a personalized user experience.
A Daily Telegraph poll showed that 64 percent of people are worried about Google’s new privacy policy and would change their online behavior.
