The President’s Weak Privacy Proposal

[Commentary] President Barack Obama has said that the country needs a strong privacy law so consumers can protect personal information from advertisers, Internet firms, employers and other businesses. But the country is not going to get it from President Obama.

The bill his administration recently offered will do little to help individuals while giving companies great leeway in determining how they collect, use and share personal data. The only possible explanation for why the Obama Administration proposed a bill as deeply flawed as this one is that it thinks this is the only kind of legislation that might gain the support of businesses and their Republican allies in Congress. Even so, with few exceptions (like Microsoft), the bill has not been embraced by the people it was supposed to appeal to. The Internet Association, which represents businesses like Amazon, Facebook and Google, complained that it “casts a needlessly imprecise net.” No bill at all would have been better than this one, which would effectively codify bad behavior.