With the proliferation of mobile gadgets connected to the internet, President Barack Obama declares it’s time the United States has a privacy Bill of Rights. Administration officials urged consumer groups and technology companies to craft and submit suggested privacy protections to add to guidelines they began crafting on Thursday. Initially, these rules will be voluntary for businesses, but participants may eventually be subject to sanctions for violations.
Clearly, this comes at a time when internet-based companies are stepping up their tracking and data mining capabilities. Next week, for example, Google begins merging all of your information they collect from their various free services (including everything from Gmail to YouTube videos to Google+ social networking status updates). GPS location capabilities on most new smartphones and tablets give marketers even more personal data to analyze, revealing where you spend most of your time shopping, dining out, which roads you travel on most often, and possibly even which friends of yours you spend the most time with. (You didn’t really think those Foursquare and Google Latitude check-ins were ignored by the companies providing you with the functionality, did you?)
Commerce Secretary John Bryson claims the privacy Bill of Rights initiative not only protects consumers, but also provides businesses with guidelines aiding them in better meeting consumer expectations. Unfortunately, I’m not confident the first part of that statement has any validity. Given its voluntary nature, it’s difficult to see how consumers are protected at all. The companies who want to secretly collect consumer data will continue to do so, simply opting out of participating in this initiative. Others will use their voluntary participation as an attempt at generating good public relations, side-skirting the privacy issues with legal fine print in click-through agreements.
I’m not a fan of legal regulation of the internet, but this privacy Bill of Rights concept strikes me as misleading the public into a false sense of security. The actual Bill of Rights is part of the law of the land; not a collection of suggested ideas companies contributed and voluntarily agreed to. The concept of a right to privacy isn’t even expressly spelled out in our Constitution. Rather, it’s more of an implied right, based on specific areas covered by the Bill of Rights and Supreme Court rulings. I think ultimately, it’s the individual who must stay vigilant to protect his or her own privacy when using the internet.
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