WASHINGTON - The White House, hoping to move the national conversation on privacy beyond data harvesting by intelligence agencies to the practices of companies like Google and Facebook, released a long-anticipated report on Thursday that recommends requiring private companies to release information they gather from their customers online.
The report, whose chief author is John D. Podesta, a senior White House adviser, is part of the administration's reaction to the disclosures of global surveillance by Edward J. Snowden, the former contractor for the National Security Agency. The effort is viewed with suspicion in Silicon Valley, where companies see it as the start of a government effort to regulate how they can profit from the data they collect from email and Web surfing habits.
Mr. Podesta, in briefing reporters on Thursday, pointed specifically to the terms of service that consumers click on, almost always without reading them, when they sign up for free email accounts or download apps for their smartphones. He asked whether that process 'still allows us to control and protect our privacy as the data is used and reused,' often to identify users' travel, buying and web browsing habits. The report focuses on mosaic techniques that allow companies, in the guise of collecting anonymous data from large groups of users, to identify an individual's activities online.
The report suggests steps Congress could take, including a mandatory system that would force firms to report data breaches - like the one that led to the theft of credit card data from 100 million Target customers last year. A similar measure failed two years ago as part of a broader cyberprotection bill.
The report also recommends extending American privacy rights to foreigners, on the theory that there are no boundaries when it comes to the data collected online. Mr. Obama declared in January that the government would do the same in the treatment of data it collected through the N.S.A. and other intelligence groups.
Mr. Podesta, in an interview, said the president was surprised during his review of the N.S.A.'s activities that 'the same technologies are not only used by the intelligence community, but far more broadly in the public and private spheres because there is so much collection' from the Internet, smartphones and other sensors.
'You are shedding data everywhere,' Mr. Podesta said.
The report notes the risk of data being used to discriminate against some Americans in new ways that are otherwise prohibited by civil and consumer rights legislation. 'Just as neighborhoods can serve as a proxy for racial or ethnic identity,' it says, 'there are new worries that big data technologies could be used to 'digitally redefine' unwanted groups, either as customers, employees, tenants or recipients of credit. A significant finding of this report is that big data could enable new forms of discrimination and predatory practices.'
Big data typically refers to the surge in old and new sources of data - web ages, browsing habits, sensor signals, social media, GPS location data from smartphones, genomic information and surveillance videos. But its other crucial technology is the clever software to mine and make sense of the data explosion.
Mr. Podesta said the report was not part of an effort to use the N.S.A. disclosures for political advantage, though he acknowledged that many executives in Silicon Valley see it that way. But he implicitly poses the question about whether private companies may ultimately be a greater threat than the government to privacy rights.
Shortly after the White House review was announced in January, privacy and consumer groups urged that the administration devise a policy and legal framework for corporations' data collection practices.
In a letter to the White House in February, more than a dozen groups noted concerns, past and present, about the danger of unrestrained data harvesting by government agencies. But, the groups wrote, 'similar concerns arise about the use of personal data by large commercial entities. Bulk collection of this data puts consumers at an ever-increasing risk.'
The Podesta report is partly an effort to revive administration recommendations made in early 2012. At the time, well before Mr. Snowden's leaks showed the reach of government surveillance, Mr. Obama proposed a Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights for the big data era. It called for giving consumers more control over how much and what kind of data companies could collect about them, and what businesses could do with that information.
'American consumers can't wait any longer for clear rules of the road that ensure their personal information is safe online,' Mr. Obama said at the time.
The 2012 guidelines, while general, were seen as a sensible approach to protecting Americans from the potential danger of wholesale data collection by Internet companies, advertisers, data brokers and other businesses. But the task of translating concepts like transparency and accountability into legislation seemed complex and time-consuming, and were opposed by business groups. Few members of Congress showed interest.
Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said that the Podesta report identified the important issues and that its policy recommendations addressed the major concerns of privacy groups. 'The implementation of those proposals,' Mr. Rotenberg said, 'is the big challenge now, what happens next.'
Posted by Unknown on Thursday, May 1, 2014 - Rating: 4.5
0 comments "White House Report Calls for Transparency in Online Data Collection"
Post a Comment