Commentary

Center For Democracy Calls For New Privacy Laws

The Center for Democracy & Technology has issued its wish list for the Obama administration and, high on the agenda, is a call for new privacy laws.

"President Obama should work with Congress to enact a comprehensive, technology-neutral consumer privacy law establishing meaningful safeguards for the personal information that companies collect from consumers," the document states. "Such a law should be broad enough to protect American consumers both online and in the 'brick and mortar' world."

The Center for Democracy & Technology's document is quite broad -- deliberately so, to leave room for interested parties to weigh in on the specifics.

Even so, the organization begs the critical question of what, exactly, constitutes "personal information." For years, many online ad executives involved in behavioral targeting or analytics have said they don't deal in "personally identifiable information" because they aren't collecting users' names, addresses, email addresses or telephone numbers. Therefore, Web execs argue, behavioral targeting and/or analytics companies don't need to obtain people's explicit consent before collecting data.

But the reality is that people can be identified even without so-called "personally identifiable information." For instance, it's possible to deduce a computer user's identity by looking at all of the searches originating at that computer -- as the world learned when AOL released search queries of 650,000 "anonymous" users. Within days of the data breach, The New York Times identified one AOL user based on her search history and ran front-page story about her.

If there's going to be new legislation addressing privacy, one of the first orders of business should be shedding old definitions of "personally identifiable information" and coming up with new standards setting out what types of personal information will be protected.

1 comment about "Center For Democracy Calls For New Privacy Laws ".
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  1. Jeffrey Chester from CDD, December 10, 2008 at 8:46 a.m.

    Bravo!

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