Yesterday, about 18 privacy advocacy groups sent a letter to U.S. Government officials which asked for a meeting and requested assurances that the U.S. not hinder new consumer privacy protections being considered by the Europe Union. The group believes that both the U.S. and Europe need to update and modernize their privacy protections for consumers.
The letter, addressed to the U.S. Attorney General, the Secretary of State, the Acting Secretary of Commerce, and two ambassadors who oversee trade with Europe, was signed by the ACLU, the Center For Digital Democracy, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), the Patient Privacy Rights Foundation (PPR), the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, and a dozen other advocacy organizations. The letter (Adobe PDF, 67k bytes) stated:
"Users around the world are experiencing increases in identity theft, security breaches, government surveillance, and secretive, discriminatory profiling. Users find that personal information given for one purpose is often used for another purpose, often without their knowledge or consent. Our personal data -‐ our privacy -‐ is being abused by both the commercial sector and governments... Europeans are working together to update and modernize their framework for privacy protection... There are many important, innovative proposals, as well as the recognition that the process of data protection can be simplified to the benefit of all. Europe is considering both an overarching Data Protection Regulation and a Directive on Law Enforcement..."
After a meeting in Brussels with several of the privacy groups, European Parliament members expressed concerns:
"... that both the US Government and US industry are mounting an unprecedented lobbying campaign to limit the protections that European law would provide... They were concerned about the absence of safeguards for personal data stored in the Cloud..."
The Telegraph reported in February 2012 about the intensive lobbyingby U.S. companies. Reportedly, U.S. lobbyists represent several tech companies including Google, Facebook, and Apple. Earlier this month, a leading privacy expert warned citizens in Europe not to use U.S.-based cloud services due to privacy and spying concerns with the FISA Amendments Act of 2008.
As I see it, the privacy letter accurately described the threats to consumers' information and privacy. This blog has reported about numerous instances of corporate data breaches, mobile apps that collected consumers' sensitive data without notice nor consent, developers that fail to provide privacy policies with their mobile apps, app developers that failed to provide privacy notices for parents about apps for their children, secret tracking of online users, software foisted on users without notice during maintenance updates, and a variety of technologies (e.g., Zombie HTTP cookies, Flash cookies, Zombie E-tags, behavioral exchanges, deep packet inspection, e-readers) used by a variety of companies to snoop and track users' online habits often without notice and consent.
More recently, a company has allegedly collected, stored, shared, and manipulated the metadata associated with photos and videos shared at social networking websites. Data privacy laws clearly have not kept pace with Internet and digital technologies.
The group's letter stated several principles in the proposed EU laws that should guide privacy efforts in both the U.S. and Europe:
"... (1) individual control over the collection and use of personal data; (2) transparency; (3) respect for the context in which data is collected; (4) security; (5) access and correction rights for consumers; (6) data limitation; and (7) accountability... These principles reflect many of the same goals contained in the European privacy initiative. But the key is that these principles must be given legal force..."
A copy of the letter is also available here (Adobe PDF, 67k bytes). Visit the CPDP website to learn more about the meeting held in Brussels last month.
The U.S. Government has no interest in lobbying he EU to lessen the scope and/or protections of EU privacy law, because no matter what the EU does, its trade agreements with the U.S. require that its law apply without discrimination to both foreign and domestic firms. And EU law extends no further in its jurisdiction than the borders of its member states.
So why is the U.S. lobbying on behalf of Facebook, Google, and others of that ilk to weaken the proposed EU privacy laws? Surely, Google and its ilk have the resources to lobby on their own behalf. Nor should the taxpayers' purse be used to lobby for the interests of private companies, especially where there is no discrimination against U.S. firms and where, as here, lobbying is attempting diminish the protection of privacy.
It sort of lets you know who your government works for, because when was the last time you, as an ordinary and small-business American, got the U.S. Departments of Commerce and State to lobby for your personal business interests?
Privacy is vital to human dignity and freedom. Our President says so. See, supra, at: http://ivebeenmugged.typepad.com/my_weblog/pdf/letter-from-consumer-and-civil-liberties-groups.pdf. So why doesn't his Executive Branch follow his words and stop molesting the EU and petitioning the EU to weaken its proposed regulations to protect privacy?
Posted by: Chanson de Roland | Tuesday, February 05, 2013 at 07:53 PM