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I wonder if this could be marketed as a 3rd-party service? Plenty of companies pay for privacy certifications that are not legally required - presumably becaus

• ilovetux 9y ago
  That is a great idea! Personally the only organization I would trust at this point would be the Free Software Foundation. They are a nonprofit organization with a long history of supporting user rights. In fact, if everyone were to use the GPL and/or Affero licenses for their software, the source code would be auditable. That would alleviate half of my concerns as I could tell what information would be available to them. All that would be left is my concern about what is done with my personal information after collection. If an organization which I trust were to issue certification which conveys assurances as to what does or doesn't happen to my data, I might be ok with that even without access to specific details. I don't think the big guys would sign up for this without incentive. That's the main reason I think a law would be the best way. In order to make this happen, a boycott could be organized. Participation would need to be easy so we could facilitate it with a custom build of Firefox (or similar) which will only allow you to visit sites certified to respect users privacy.
• ilovetux 9y ago
  @siegel I want to express my appreciation for your responses, simply discussing this has made me more at ease. I had time to mull this over. I even went so far as to draft a few emails and even started in on a business plan for a business which could offer this type of certification. I have had to reconsider. There is no finality to this solution. The details of the certification would have to be ironed out beforehand and would need to be fluid enough to allow for changes as needed. Then there would have to be a penal framework defined around the entire process. In fact the only real benefit to this would be that the barrier to entry for starting a new business (or NGO) is less than that for getting a law passed. I feel the need to accommodate both sides of the isle here as I love creating and using technology, so I would never want to hurt the technology sector. I, however, feel very strongly that some fundamental, undefined right of ours is being violated. We have absolutely no idea what is happening with the data collected about us, therefore I do not believe that we have the ability to enter into a contract in any sensible way. Some might argue that we have no right to know what a company is doing with the money we gave to them, but that argument is flawed because money has no significant attachment to ourselves after we tender payment. Copyright law provides a default of no rights except to the author of a creative work, could this be used to enforce the duplication of our data or at least force some sort of dual-licensing for the co-creators of the data. As an example: I am a user of a fictional online service, monitor.com. I interact with the service in a variety of ways which in turn generates a lot of data about my use of the service. Also present on the page is a social network integration (ie. a facebook "like" button) which also reports on data generated by not only my interaction with monitor.com, but also correlates this with my actions on other sites. Now in this scenario, monitor.com and myself work together to create a series of data-points. At the same time, I am working with the social network to create a larger data set. If we could be acknowledged as co-creators of the data, what ramifications could that have on the legalities involving the duplication of the data? When the data is transmitted over a network, it is indeed copied. Does one co-creator have an inerrant right to use the data without a specific license being granted, more importantly can a co-creator grant licenses to third parties without the explicit consent of the other co-creator? This is probably a false argument based on a certain level of legal ignorance on my part. Ideally, I would simply like an established right to know when data about me is collected or used so I can make an informed decision on whether or not to continue using the service. I believe a law is necessary as a free-market solution could not provide a consistent level of assurances, there would always be doubts. I am not looking to punish anyone or to be petty, but I would like it to be established that this right exists. Violations could be a civil matter, I could sue or initiate a class action lawsuit. Is it possible to simply pass a law without specifically defining the penalties and governance policies?
  • siegel 9y ago
    I'm impressed by the careful thought you are putting into this. On the copyright front, that body of law is not going to do it for us. And it's such a well-developed body of law motivated by very different sets of concerns, that I don't think trying to shoehorn privacy rights into it would yield the right results. Typically when laws are passed regarding these types of regulatory matters, there are penalties specified (either in the statute or in regulations) and there is a regulatory body setup to enforce the law. But you don't technically need a regulatory body, as you point out. Take the example of labor laws in California. Yes, there is a labor department and an enforcement body. But several years ago, the State of California realized that its regulatory enforcement division was understaffed and underresourced. So, the Private Attorney General Act was passed (PAGA), which allows private litigants to initiate something like a class action to enforce labor laws against their employers, without all the requirements of certifying a class action. There's no reason this couldn't be done for privacy law enforcement. Of course, there are also regular old class actions, as well. But if you wanted to encourage enforcement, a more friendly mechanism would be preferable. At the federal level (and in many states), the tides are against class actions. It's become more and more difficult to bring them. So, there's that issue. But the bigger problem here goes back to the fact that the US hasn't seen fit to enact much in the way of basic data privacy protection compared to other developed nations. That's why I point to the EU, as a comparison. I'll try to find a good resource to compare US vs. EU data privacy laws. You might be shocked. The reason I pointed to private business as a way to start is that a constituency has to develop in favor of any law requiring this type of data privacy reporting/protection. It doesn't appear to exist yet. It seems like we need a cultural shift. And the genius behind your idea is that it would provide information that might start a cultural shift. So, if one were to create an ACME INC. that would offer an easy software solution other companies could subscribe to in order to get do this type of reporting AND the market started to demand it to some extent (which might require good marketing by ACME INC.), at least that might start the ball rolling towards creating a constituency. Let me give you a non-privacy related example. You might not realize that dietary supplements (like vitamins) are not really regulated for content. False advertising laws apply to supplements, like anything else. But there is no agency verifying that your vitamins contain what the bottle says. An organization called USP, which is a private organization, has begun offering verification services. A company (like Nature Made) can pay to have a supplement verified by USP and then they can put that verification on their labels. But that's not a government verification. It's a private verification. In some ways, that's the data privacy system in the US. There's little data privacy regulation outside of certain fields (healthcare, banking, schools). In the unregulated fields (most things), companies may have a privacy policy. You can sue for violation of the privacy policy, perhaps. But that's it. Private organizations offer certifications (Trustee, for example). Yours would be another private attempt to create something akin to a regulatory system (though it would really be an information delivery system). If you wanted to get a law passed, I'd go abroad to somewhere like the EU. If one could lobby to get this passed there, plenty of companies in the US might start adopting this technology anyway.