The Commission is correct to focus on consumer injury because it is central to a rational privacy regime based on actual harms. Such a regime is most likely to help consumers.
The alternative, favored by many privacy advocates, is to prophylactically limit the collection, use, sharing, and retention of data in an attempt to protect consumers from hypothetical concerns about data being used in harmful ways. This is the approach taken by the Fair Information Practice Principles (FIPPs) dating back to the 1970s, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD’s) Privacy Principles of 1980, and the FTC’s own 2012 privacy report. In a world of big data, however, where innovative new uses of data are unpredictable, the focus on data minimization has come to be seen as increasingly costly.
Attachments
Thomas Lenard is Senior Fellow and President Emeritus at the Technology Policy Institute. Lenard is the author or coauthor of numerous books and articles on telecommunications, electricity, antitrust, privacy, e-commerce and other regulatory issues. His publications include Net Neutrality or Net Neutering: Should Broadband Internet Services Be Regulated?; The Digital Economy Fact Book; Privacy and the Commercial Use of Personal Information; Competition, Innovation and the Microsoft Monopoly: Antitrust in the Digital Marketplace; and Deregulating Electricity: The Federal Role.
Before joining the Technology Policy Institute, Lenard was acting president, senior vice president for research and senior fellow at The Progress & Freedom Foundation. He has served in senior economics positions at the Office of Management and Budget, the Federal Trade Commission and the Council on Wage and Price Stability, and was a member of the economics faculty at the University of California, Davis. He is a past president and chairman of the board of the National Economists Club.
Lenard is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin and holds a PhD in economics from Brown University. He can be reached at [email protected]
