DMA: Industry Should Draft Any Future Voluntary Privacy Codes

The Digital Marketing Association already has plenty of suggestions to improve the National Telecommunications & Information Administration's (NTIA) multistakeholder process for enforcing the Obama Administration's consumer privacy "bill of rights."

Those include letting industry create guidelines and give individual companies the opportunity to participate or not without any pressure from NTIA. Jerry Cerasale, senior VP, government affairs, for DMA, provided a number of suggestions in a letter to the NTIA chief Lawrence Strickling. Those suggestions include that industry stakeholders should draft any code they will have to consider adopting, with the multistakeholder meetings providing the opportunity for others, which would include public advocacy groups, to comment on the draft and decide whether or not they will support them. The Consumer Federation of America has recommended a selection process for code drafters from the broader multistakeholder community, which would include public advocacy groups like CFA. In addition to nixing that idea, DMA also doesn't like CFA's suggestion of hiring an outside party to facilitate or draft the code, and DMA says the industry should handle implementation testing.