The Federal Trade Commission will safeguard privacy in name only

If the American people and Congress are looking to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for leadership in the protection of personal privacy, they should prepare for disappointment. In a recent filing with the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration, the FTC walked away from giving consumers meaningful control of their private information. The bromides they espoused sound remarkably similar to the arguments of the companies that routinely exploit our privacy. The FTC followed the typical Trump Administration tactic of sounding like it stands for something before ultimately standing down. “Giving consumers the ability to exercise meaningful control over the collection and use of data about them is beneficial,” the filing states before ending the sentence with the gutting qualifier, “in some cases.” The agency that so many in Congress look to as the institution to protect consumer privacy then warned, “certain controls can be costly to implement and may have unintended consequences.”

[Tom Wheeler is a visiting fellow in Governance Studies at Brookings. He was Chairman of the Federal Communication Commission from 2013 to 2017.]