Just last month we were writing about how privacy is seen as a bipartisan issue in Washington and an area this Congress may take action. Well, maybe not so much. Yes, there's lots of talk -- and SOME action (bills introduced, hearings held) -- but the prospects for a major piece of legislation becoming law seem dimmer and dimmer.
On May 19, Politico's Tony Romm gave readers a peak behind the curtain, exposing some Congressional turf wars. You see, although there may be support among both Democrats and Republicans in the House and the Senate, there's still lots of politics to sort through. Which Congressional committee will be the primary mover for a bill? And which of many, many proposals will be the legislation that moves through Congress?
Romm notes the current tension between Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) and the Senate Judiciary Committee headed by Patrick Leahy (D-VT). John Eggerton first raised the issue in Multichannel News back in March. Then, Commerce Committee leadership wrote Chairman Leahy saying his newly-created Privacy, Technology & Law Subcommittee appeared to exceed judiciary's scope and overlaps with legislative matters "squarely within the jurisdiction of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee." Now, in the wake of a May 10 mobile privacy hearing held by the Judiciary Committee's new subcommittee, Chairman Rockefeller 1) released his own online-tracking bill and 2) had his Committee's Consumer Protection, Product Safety and Insurance Subcommittee hold a hearing on mobile privacy.
The inside-the-Beltway power struggle potentially spells political trouble for online privacy legislation at a time when many lawmakers say new rules are needed for Web companies like Google and smartphone-makers like Apple.
Just this week, the Wall Street Journal exposed that "social widgets" -- like Facebook's "Likes" and Twitter's "Tweet" buttons which appear atop stories on news sites or alongside products on retail sites, notify Facebook and Twitter that a person visited those sites even when users don't click on the buttons. These widgets are prolific. They have been added to millions of web pages in the past year. Facebook's buttons appear on a third of the world's 1,000 most-visited websites, according to the study. Buttons from Twitter and Google Inc. appear on 20% and 25% of those sites, respectively. The widgets, which were created to make it easy to share content with friends and to help websites attract visitors, are a potentially powerful way to track Internet users. They could link users' browsing habits to their social-networking profile, which often contains their name. For this to work, a person only needs to have logged into Facebook or Twitter once in the past month. The sites will continue to collect browsing data, even if the person closes their browser or turns off their computers, until that person explicitly logs out of their Facebook or Twitter accounts, the study found. [NOTE: This is just the latest in the Wall Street Journal's What They Know series]
And the Future of Privacy Forum reports that nearly three-quarters of the most popular mobile apps lack even a basic privacy policy.
Privacy, as we all know, is big in Europe. This week saw policymakers making the first steps to formulating a law on mobile phone location data, and could be written into Europe’s revised Data Protection Directive this year. Article 29 Working Party , a panel of European data protection officials that advises the European Commission, is proposing that 1) companies should get permission from smartphone users before collecting geographic information, 2) data collectors should specify what purpose the data are being used for, and 3) location services must be switched off as a default.
In the US, Federal Trade Commission consumer protection chief David Vladeck recently warned online ad companies that new enforcement actions are in the works. "The FTC will step in when false or misleading privacy claims have the effect of undermining consumer choices," he said.
We'll keep ay eye on the continuing debate and you can track all our online privacy coverage. Next week, expect the policy debate next week to shift back to spectrum allocation.