Europe and the U.S. have distinctly different approaches to data and online privacy. In Europe, privacy is considered a fundamental right, a concept reflected in EU draft general data protection regulation currently under consideration. The U.S. is increasingly relying on multistakeholder processes, such as the ones at the W3C and the NTIA to try to develop consensus standards around which various groups can coalesce. How will the different approaches to data protection be reconciled? How will they play out in the context of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership negotiations involving trade in digital goods and cross-border data flows? How will the recent revelations about the PRISM surveillance program complicate negotiation and cooperation going forward? Participants on the panel “Privacy, Data Security and Trade – Policy Choices” at this year’s TPI Aspen Forum will give their views on these issues.
Privacy and Security
Questions about privacy are central to the digital economy. We study how much people value privacy, the privacy paradox, and developments in state and federal privacy legislation. Our work has contributed to policy discussions of data portability, data regulation, and advertising models.
The FTC and Privacy: We Don’t Need No Stinking Data
“The privacy debate is taking place in an empirical vacuum,” state Thomas Lenard and Paul Rubin in “The FTC and Privacy: We Don’t Need No Stinking Data” published in The Antitrust Source, a journal of the American Bar Association. The article evaluates two recent Federal Trade Commission privacy reports and concludes that they suffer from a lack of data and analysis and therefore “are seriously deficient as a foundation for new policy recommendations.”
Online privacy: Do we need ‘Do-Not-Track’?
Can “self-regulation” adequately protect privacy online? That question was posed during a recent Senate Commerce Committee hearing focused on the current self-regulatory effort to develop a “Do-Not-Track” (DNT) mechanism – and answered in the negative by the committee’s senior Democrats, who believe privacy legislation is long overdue. Commerce Committee Chairman Rockefeller emphasized that he was speaking for consumers. But despite years of such hearings, the benefits to consumers of privacy regulation of any kind – let alone net benefits (i.e., benefits minus costs) – have yet to be demonstrated.