Online privacy

Despite the failures of our current online privacy ecosystem, some lawmakers are considering doubling down on policies that do not work. But no matter how much control companies give us over our data, it will never work online. That’s because control and transparency place the burden on consumers to protect themselves and understand where their data is going. And they must do this for every one of the dozens (or more) online accounts they may have.

Google and other search engines shouldn’t be forced to apply the European Union’s “right to be forgotten” beyond the bloc’s borders, an adviser to the EU’s top court argued. The recommendation—if followed by the EU’s Court of Justice—would be a major victory for Google, which has for three years been fighting an order from France’s privacy regulator to apply the EU principle globally.  Maciej Szpunar, an advocate general for the court, argued in a nonbinding opin

Sen Ron Wyden (D-OR) has blasted US wireless carriers for continuing to sell their users' location data after they promised to end the practice in June 2018. Sen Wyden renewed calls for Senate to adopt his legislation to ban carriers from selling mobile subscribers' location after a Motherboard report revealed that T-Mobile, AT&T, and Sprint continue to sell location data to third-party aggregators that are allowing the data to be resold on the black market to anyone willing to pay. 

Will this new Congress be the one to pass data privacy legislation? So far the Senate has done the most visible work. And, with a variety of stakeholders contributing input, will this be enough to bring about passage? As a committed optimist, it’s my belief that there is a sweet spot where business interests and privacy advocates can converge.

Hundreds of cities, large and small, have adopted or begun planning smart cities projects. But the risks are daunting. Experts say cities frequently lack the expertise to understand privacy, security and financial implications of such arrangements. Some mayors acknowledge that they have yet to master the responsibilities that go along with collecting billions of bits of data from residents. Concerns have intensified as Kansas City prepares to expand its technology experiment from downtown to poor neighborhoods on the city’s East Side.

Spring 2018, soon after Facebook acknowledged that the data of tens of millions of its users had improperly been obtained by the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, a top enforcement official at the Federal Trade Commission drafted a memo about the prospect of disciplining the social network. Lawmakers, consumer advocates and even former commission officials were clamoring for tough action against Facebook, arguing that it had violated an earlier Federal Trade Commission consent decree barring it from misleading users about how their information was shared.

To accommodate a 21st-century workforce, we need to make sure we have 21st-century infrastructure. No serious infrastructure plan is complete without addressing broadband expansion. There is strong bipartisan support for including broadband funding in any infrastructure package, and that's good news. As we expand access to broadband, we must also do more to protect people's data online.

Washington spent the better part of 2018 talking tough to tech companies and threatening a crackdown on the wanton collection, dissemination, and monetization of personal data. But all of that was just prelude. The real privacy showdown is slated for 2019.

That Facebook can’t stay out of the headlines is not just a crisis for Facebook. It’s also a crisis for the Federal Trade Commission—indeed, it’s a “credibility-check moment.” Every day that passes in which the consent order is not enforced against Facebook adds to speculation that something is deeply broken at the agency. Moreover, the tech firms want the FTC to be named as their sole regulator, pre-empting stronger action by states and their attorneys general to protect privacy.

The attorney general for the District of Columbia filed a lawsuit against Facebook for allowing Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy, to gain access to the names, "likes" and other personal data about tens of millions of the social site's users without their permission. The lawsuit filed by Karl Racine marks the first major effort by regulators in the US to penalize the tech giant for its entanglement with the firm. It could presage even tougher fines and other punishments still to come for Facebook as additional state and federal investigations continue.