Fergie's Tech Blog

Are Privacy Notices Worthless?

Jay Cline writes on ComputerWorld:

While the rest of the country was debating the merits of Nancy Pelosi’s new look, minor shockwaves were reverberating throughout the U.S. privacy community over a truly critical issue: privacy notices.

Fred Cate, a highly regarded privacy guru at the Indiana University School of Law, had testified at a November Federal Trade Commission (FTC) hearing that privacy notices have failed us. "There’s no one in America who’s read a privacy notice who wasn’t paid to," he taunted.

Cate, usually a libertarian, said that instead of having companies provide their customers privacy notices and the chance to opt out — two bedrock principles the FTC has long promoted — the U.S. government needs to impose new restrictions on what U.S. businesses can and can’t do with customers’ information. It was the privacy world’s equivalent of Donald Rumsfeld saying that the U.S. has lost in Iraq and that France needs to take over.

So what’s the big deal? Why did this cause so much buzz across the country’s back corridors of privacy?

posted by Fergie @ 1/26/2007 03:13:00 PM