American Civil Liberties Union

In September I wrote about how policymakers often act on privacy issues only when they themselves feel their privacy personally threatened—for example when Robert Bork’s video rental records were obtained by a reporter. Now Peter Maass, writing in the New Yorker and ProPublica, is raising a key question about the Petraeus scandal: will lawmakers sit up and take notice of how easily the CIA Director’s private emails were discovered? Will they “start worrying a bit more about becoming the next Petraeus or Bork”? It may well be true that the discovery of an affair by an FBI agent would not have led to anything had the subject been an ordinary person, but because Petraeus was in such an important role, the finding kept getting passed around because nobody dared to take the responsibility of doing nothing about it. And inevitably, it eventually leaked. As Maass astutely observes, “the Petraeus case shows that among the people who have the most to lose from unchecked surveillance are the people who thought they would benefit from it—government elites.”

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.

In the digital age that we live in today, we are constantly exposing our personal information online. From using cell phones and GPS devices to online shopping and sending e-mail, the things we do and say online leave behind ever-growing trails of personal information. The ACLU believes that Americans shouldn’t have to choose between using new technology and keeping control of your private information. Each week, we feature some of the most interesting news related to technology and civil liberties that we’ve spotted from the previous week.

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.