White House May Be Close to Unveiling Plan of Action to Address Online Privacy Concerns

by Jeremy Leaming

The White House appears to being moving closer to revealing a strategy for addressing rising concerns over privacy breaches in cyberspace.

Politico reports that a White House event tomorrow is “likely to set the stage for the public unveiling of the administration’s highly anticipated white paper on online privacy, which has been more than a year in the making. The white paper is expected to call for a consumer privacy bill of rights from Congress, while charging the industry to police itself under the watch of federal regulators.”

Some commentators suggest that the administration’s policy is likely influenced, in part, by the work of the Commerce Department’s Internet Policy Task Force, which issued a green paper after a year-long review “that included extensive consultations with commercial, civil society, governmental and academic stakeholders ….”

The paper’s forward asserts that protections of consumers’ privacy “are crucial to maintaining the consumer trust that nurtures the Internet’s growth.”

The potential release of the administration’s plans to address privacy concerns comes admist reporting by The Wall Street Journal that the Internet advertising giant, Google, had bypassed “the privacy settings of millions of people using” Apple’s Web browser, Safari, apparently allowing Google to track “the Web-browsing habits of people who intended for that kind of monitoring to be blocked.”

Steve Musil for CNET notes that Microsoft has accused Google of using “similar methods to get around the default privacy protections” of Microsoft’s Web browser. Google responded to CNET, in a written statement, that “It is well-known – including by Microsoft – that it is impractical to comply with Microsoft’s request while providing modern Web functionality. We have been open about our approach, as have many other Web sites.”

WSJ’s report notes that Google’s “privacy practices are under intense scrutiny. Last year, as part of a far-reaching legal settlement with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission the company pledged not to ‘misrepresent’ its privacy practices to consumers. The fine for violating the agreement is $16,000 per violation, per day.”

The executive summary of the Task Force’s green paper states, in part:

Commercial data privacy policy must address a continuum of risks to personal privacy ranging, from minor nuisances and unfair surprises, to disclosure of sensitive information in violation of individual rights, injury or discrimination based on sensitive personal attributes that are improperly disclosed, actions and decisions in response to misleading or inaccurate information, and costly and potentially life-disrupting identity theft. In the aggregate, even the harms at the less severe end of this spectrum have significant adverse effects, because they undermine consumer trust in the Internet environment.

[image via o5com]