Consumer Online Privacy

11/09/2012

Data Brokers

Data Brokers Release Information About Their Operations In Response to Congressional Inquiry

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 5:18pm

Yesterday Reps. Ed Markey (D, Mass.) and Joe Barton (R, Texas) released a batch of important details about the operation of the nation’s largest data broker companies. The information came in responses from nine data broker companies to a list of questions posed by a group of Members led by Markey and Barton seeking details of their operation in light of the privacy sensitivity of what they do. The responses released yesterday provide a good snapshot and reminder of what it is these companies are doing.

10/17/2012

Consumer Online Privacy

Protections Against Commercial Internet Spying: Why Delay is Deadly

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 12:13pm

I wrote last week about how the ad industry is going on the attack against Do Not Track. Then yesterday, as the New York Times reported, the Direct Marketing Association kicked off a $1 million public relations campaign to try to persuade policymakers and the public that privacy protections from the data mining industry are not needed. Unfortunately, those who are advocating on behalf of the public do not have $1 million to throw into a counter-campaign. The outcome will be a test of the degree to which money can trump the public good in our political system right now. And that highlights one of the dynamics that it seems to me is at work when it comes to regulating commercial privacy: delay is deadly.

10/12/2012

Do Not Track

Doesn’t the Ad Industry Trust the Free Market?

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 12:33pm

The advertising industry continues to mount a strong attack on the Do Not Track concept for protecting online privacy. As my colleague Chris Calabrese described last week, the industry threw an “epic hissy fit” (in the words of Ed Bott at ZDNet) over Microsoft’s laudable decision to turn on Do Not Track by default in Internet Explorer.

10/10/2012

Artificial Intelligence

Newest Video Analytics Technique “Product Recognition” Aims to Judge You By What You Wear

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 4:56pm

I blogged recently about video analytics, the attempt to build intelligence into video surveillance so that cameras can not only record our every move in public, but also in some respects understand what they are seeing. Now comes word of the latest twist in this effort: “product recognition.” As Technology Review reports, a startup called Graymatics

10/04/2012

Consumer Online Privacy

Corporate America: We Want to Track You

By Chris Calabrese, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 5:44pm

On Monday an extraordinary letter went out from a who’s who of major corporations claiming a mandate to track all of us on the internet. In tone and substance, it is an amazing, over-the-top screed against efforts to give consumers even modest controls over who watches us as we surf online.

The letter was triggered by Microsoft’s announcement in May that when it ships its new browser, IE 10, the browser’s default setting will be Do Not Track. Microsoft heard the vast preference of its users and is giving them the default setting they want—no tracking of their movements and habits online. Consumers who want to get targeted ads will still be able to do so—and in fact will get a chance to turn that preference on when the program loads. As we said at the time, this is exactly the right decision, a powerful tool for giving back American’s their privacy online.

09/26/2012

Consumer Online Privacy

FTC Proposes Changes to Privacy Law That Collide With Free Speech

By Gabe Rottman, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 11:59am

Back in the waning years of the Clinton administration, Congress quietly enacted an important internet privacy bill (the passage of which was overshadowed by other, more salacious developments). The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (“COPPA”) requires any website “target[ing]” children under the age of 13 to notify a child’s parent and receive verifiable consent before collecting personal information from that child. A lot of COPPA is about controlling online marketing activities involving young children, who may not appreciate the dangers in disclosing sensitive personal information to commercial entities.

09/21/2012

Civil Liberties in the Digital Age

Lie Detection, Special Treatment at the Airport, and Recursive Cameras (Friday Links Roundup)

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 4:26pm

Salon has a nice piece on how research shows the difficulty of detecting lies—the impossibility, really—and how people consistently overestimate their ability to do so. And, how people consistently misidentify signs of stress (from a variety of causes) as proof of lying. Of course, an entire TSA program has been built on the premise that people can be trained to detect lies with a reasonable level of certainty.

09/14/2012

Online Privacy

Twitter Forced to Hand Over Occupy Wall Street Protester Info

By Naomi Gilens, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 5:28pm

This morning, faced with the threat of criminal and civil contempt, Twitter turned over information about Occupy Wall Street protester Malcolm Harris to a New York criminal court judge. This development follows Twitter’s months-long effort to challenge the Manhattan District Attorney Office’s subpoena for Harris’s information, which was issued as part of the D.A.’s disorderly conduct prosecution of Harris stemming from his participation at an Occupy event last fall.

09/13/2012

Consumer Online Privacy

Is the ACLU Inconsistent on Regulation of Speech and Privacy?

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 3:02pm

Adam Thierer of the libertarian Mercatus Center posted a thoughtful critique of my recent piece on online tracking and consumer “choice.” I wrote about a new paper on behavioral advertising and how it “demonstrates the absurdity of the position that individuals who desire privacy must attempt to win a technological arms race with the multi-billion dollar internet-advertising industry.”

08/30/2012

Consumer Online Privacy

Online Tracking and Consumer “Choice”

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 7:45am

A group of privacy researchers (including some responsible for the excellent privacy studies done by the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology) have an interesting paper out this week in the Harvard Law & Policy Review on behavioral advertising. In the paper, the authors (Chris Jay Hoofnagle, Ashkan Soltani, Nathaniel Good, Dietrich J. Wambach, and Mika D. Ayenson) argue against the idea that privacy-protecting regulations somehow take choice away from consumers who are grown-up enough to fend for themselves. Such arguments are currently being thrown around in an attempt to forestall Do Not Track from being implemented (as I discussed here).

American Civil Liberties Union