By Mark Little
New York, NY – June 29, 2010 – Privacy debacles from Google and Facebook are raising public awareness of the Internet giants’ reliance on our data to make their money, as well as the liberties being taken with our privacy. This is leading governments to show increased interest in regulation that enforces opt in for new privacy settings. Google is against regulation, fearing the start of an opt-in bandwagon that will diminish its ability to freely access people’s and companies’ data across the Internet – the bedrock of its profits and, more importantly, its market power.
One privacy gaffe too many piques public and government attention
Google Buzz was launched in February 2010. A social networking addition to Google’s Gmail service, it was designed to instantly create a social network of nearly 150 million. Without prior consent, Google set Buzz’s defaults to post information from your Google Reader and Picassa accounts on a Buzz profile visible to your contacts list, and to “auto-follow” your contacts as well as have them auto-follow you. Google presumed, as all social networks rather primitively seem to, that your email contacts are all homogeneous “friends’” rather than a spectrum of business and personal acquaintances that we wish to treat very differently. Google quickly felt the venting of the public’s fury at having their privacy violated with no clear way to opt out. The solution was for Google to effectively reset the default from opt out to opt in, invite users to manually approve followers, and make the privacy settings more transparent. However, the damage was already done.
The application of opt-in regulation is the problem, not opt in itself
Google is now lobbying hard against opt-in regulation that might allow users to opt in to new privacy settings, and is using its own scare tactics by picking only those example contexts that make an opt-in method look completely impractical, such as the setting of cookies on entering a website. Google suggests, understandably, that if users were asked to opt in to the setting of every cookie then they could be prompted to click through dozens of requests to accept cookies, quickly making the Internet user experience dysfunctional – a point that Google is using to damn opt-in regulation altogether.
However, let’s look at Google’s solution to the Buzz privacy debacle. Google didn’t allow its users to opt in to start with, but its solution following the uproar was to belatedly change privacy settings to an opt-in method. It’s interesting to consider that, had regulation existed, the Buzz privacy error might never have happened. Opt-in regulation in itself is not the problem and should not be discounted; the problem lies with the type of opt-in regulation and the manner in which it’s applied.
Pressure for more transparency and control of personal data
If regulators were to move ahead with such opt-in regulation, anything but the most subtle and nuanced implementation would suffice. Otherwise, as Google fears, it could become a drag on the consumer’s Internet experience. That said, what is the problem with well-crafted regulation that allows users to opt in to privacy settings that can identify them as a “natural person” (EU directive speak for a real identifiable person)? After all, this would not impact the collection of data such as IP addresses and browser types.
We believe that, for the sake of the consumer’s privacy and Internet experience, any first regulatory step should not be about force feeding opt in or defending the current opt-out methodology, but about enforcing a satisfactory level of transparency and control as an essential first phase of regulation. This way, users can start to learn and understand where their data goes and how it is used. Starting with vastly improved transparency and control of personal data might then avoid the need for opt-in regulation, deploying it instead as recommended best practice – a far more nuanced approach that even Google might adopt.
We can’t escape the fact that the recent appalling privacy debacles have set the opt-in regulatory bandwagon running, and along with it demands for greater transparency of personal data use from both governments and the public. The online industry should expect intense pressure for more transparency and control of personal data not so far down the line.
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