Why we need a ‘privacy label’ on the internet

[Commentary] When Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified before two committees earlier in April, even GOP lawmakers typically opposed to regulations said new rules to restrict the actions of Facebook and other internet companies may be necessary. That’s a bad idea. Restrictions may help establish better metes and bounds around privacy and security practices, but there will still be privacy lapses or security breaches due to, among other things, employee negligence, systems failure and the violations of agreements and those laws. 

But we can make consumers better informed about how a website could or could not use their data. In fact, there’s a good historic analogy for such a policy: the food label, which was created more than 50 years ago and refined over time. It now provides consumers with simple, easy-to-understand information about their food. We could create a new label to provide similar information about a website’s use of their data. This “privacy label” would be a light-touch way of putting privacy information into consumer’s hands without unreasonably hampering industry. A short-form disclosure to consumers may not be a perfect solution, but it would educate consumers without overly restricting internet companies. 

[Bart A. Lazar is a partner at Seyfarth Shaw and practices in the field of data privacy and intellectual property law.]