Privacy and Security

A critique of the Federal Trade Commission’s recent approach to online privacy issues by the Technology Policy Institute’s Thomas Lenard and Paul Rubin is included in the new book The Regulatory Revolution at the FTC: A Thirty-Year Perspective on Competition and Consumer Protection. The book, edited by James C. Cooper of George Mason University School of Law, is a collection of essays by leading scholars and officials on how economics-based policymaking at the Commission has laid the groundwork for sensible consumer protection and antitrust regulations. Lenard and Rubin analyze the FTC’s recent privacy reports through the prism of the “regulatory revolution” at the FTC thirty years ago and find the current approach wanting in terms of yielding net benefits for consumers.

“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.”

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.