Antitrust Law Daily Wrap Up, PRIVACY NEWS: Civil liberties groups urge White House to make further changes to privacy plan, (Mar 4, 2015)

By Brian Hammond,TR Daily

The White House should make several changes to its recently released discussion draft legislation on consumer privacy to ensure that it effectively protects Americans' privacy rights, several civil liberties group said in a letter to President Obama yesterday.

The draft legislation released on February 27 would rely on the use of enforceable codes of conduct developed for specific industries and contexts to ensure compliance with a Consumer Bill of Rights based on principles the administration outlined in 2012.

The Center for Democracy and Technology, the Center for Digital Democracy, Common Sense Media, Consumer Action, Consumers Union, Consumer Watchdog, Electronic Frontier Foundation, the National Consumers League, the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute, Public Knowledge, Privacy Rights Knowledge, and U.S. PIRG teamed up to write to the White House listing a range of concerns with the draft legislation.

"We also appreciate that before the discussion draft was released, your administration made several changes that many privacy advocates suggested, including changes to maintain longstanding privacy protections under the Communications Act," the letter says. "We applaud your administration’s willingness to work with us to improve the draft. Nevertheless, substantial changes must still be made for the legislation to effectively protect Americans’ right to privacy."

"The bill should provide individuals with more meaningful and enforceable control over the collection, use and sharing of their personal information," the letter adds. "The bill should uphold state privacy laws and afford stronger regulatory and enforcement authority to the Federal Trade Commission."

Among the concerns, the letter argues that the bill "does not adequately define what constitutes sensitive information, nor provide consumers with meaningful choices about this data." The bill also "does not protect large categories of personal information," the letter says, adding that it is "unclear if the bill protects geolocation data, and there are broad exceptions for business records, data 'generally available to the public,' and cyber threat indicators."

The bill also would give companies "broad leeway to determine the protections that consumers will receive" and allows companies to "retain data indefinitely for investigations into certain types of crimes, without ever placing clear limits on data retention for that purpose," the letter says.

The letter also says the bill includes a "broad exception for unreasonable uses of data that are supervised by self-regulatory Privacy Review Boards" and fails to give the FTC adequate resources or strong enough standards to review "what could be hundreds of proposed Codes of Conduct and Privacy Review Boards."

Other concerns raised in the letter include the reliance on multistakeholder processes, which the groups said have "brought few benefits for consumers - and that are often dominated by industry"; the lack of a guarantee for consumers of "meaningful access to and the ability to correct most sets of records held by data brokers"; and the preemption of strong state laws, "including many that give citizens the ability to defend their privacy rights in court."

"Our substantive concerns were compounded by the way in which this bill was developed," the groups said. "Most of our organizations were left out of consultations and were allowed to review the draft only one week prior to its release. Many organizations outside the Beltway were not able to review the legislation at all."

News: Privacy FederalTradeCommissionNews