Intellectual Property Law

Experts Agree: Internet Privacy is an Oxymoron

By Cynthia Brumfield

(Washington, DC) In the wake of the flap involving Facebook's Beacon program, which circulates information about a user's online purchases from third-party retailers to relevant Facebook friends, Internet privacy is coming under ever-increasing scrutiny. One discouraging conclusion from a panel of privacy experts at today's State of the Net conference is that it's almost impossible to keep putatively private data out of sight on the Internet.

FTC Commissioner Jon Leibowitz kicked off the discussion by noting that he's now a Facebook user and "I'm having a lot of fun with it." Regarding Facebook's Beacon program, which initially didn't allow but now allows users to opt-out of sharing personal purchase information with friends, Leibowitz said that "a true opt-in is almost aways preferable...but still Beacon is better that it was."

The FTC's guidelines regarding this kind of "behavioral advertising," released in late December (PDF here), stress that transparency to users, i.e. making sure users know what data is circulated to whom, "goes a long way" to redressing some privacy concerns, Leibowitz said.

That's all well and good, UC Berkeley's Danah Boyd said, but true transparency in a social context is rare because your friends have data about you that they may in turn share with others. "You don't necessarily have a good idea of how you've been 'outed' by the people around you," she said.

Facebook's Chief Privacy Officer Chris Kelly defended Facebook's efforts to protect privacy saying that society in general makes it inherently difficult to keep things private. "We've always erred on the side of giving you control, not perfect control, because that doesn't exist in the real world."

Privacy policies are almost worthless, GWU Law School professor Daniel Solove said. "The problem with privacy policies is that they're incredibly lengthy and burdensome [and can be unilaterally changed at any time]. No one I know has read that many privacy policies." When asked to address a particular aspect of Facebook's privacy policy, the FTC's Leibowitz generated chuckles in the audience when he said "I haven't looked at Facebook's privacy policy."

Santa Clara University Professor Eric Goldman said that Facebook ran into hot water with its Beacon program because it somehow smacked of unseemliness. "Facebook-Beacon had an undercurrent of trying to take advantage of our social networks."

GWU's Solove said that young people don't appreciate that information they post about themselves today will follow them for the rest of their lives. "They're going to have a lot of embarassing gossip and rumor swirling about them possibly for the rest of their lives."

One solution is to allow people to take data with them as they leave social networks in order to pull it out of circulation. Facebook, however, has rules that restrict the data users can take with them when they leave.

Facebook's Kelly said that those rules exist for users' protection. "It's very important to have rules about how that data gets taken. We don't want it to be the basis for spams and scams."

Full post as published by IP Democracy on January 30, 2008 (boomark / email).