Advocates push back on exemption in federal privacy rules
39 consumer advocate groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Free Press, said that placing an exemption in looming federal privacy rules for broadband providers that covers data divorced from an individual customer would be ill-advised and illegal. The Federal Communications Commission is in the process of crafting rules that, under a proposal from FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, would make it harder for Internet providers to use their customers' data for most purposes. Privacy and consumer groups said in a Sept 7 letter to Chairman Wheeler that the commission shouldn’t make an exception for data that has been stripped of information that could identify the customer to whom it belongs.
“We urge the Commission to resist some parties’ request for the creation of a special carve-out for ‘de-identified’ customer information,” the groups said. “There is no room in the statute to accommodate that request.” “Even if there were, it would be harmful to consumers to allow ISPs to make an end-run around privacy rules simply by removing certain identifiers from data, while leaving vast swaths of customer details largely intact,” they added. The groups argued that it would be easy to re-connect the data with a user. “It is often trivial to re-identify data that has supposedly been de-identified," they said in the latest salvo in the battle over the rules.