A Lawyer's Look at the FTC's Privacy Report

What is the job role of a lawyer ? Simply making things look right. So if the party he or she is doing thewrong thing, what the lawye has to do is to make it look right. Thats whats happening.

The FTC (among others) has been pushing public education as one means to improve the climate of privacy protection.  There are, of course, many simple measures that consumers (and others) can take to help protect their own privacy, many of which may be as effective as anything the government can conceive.  The FTC, for example, in its recent report praises the use of "do not follow" software on internet search software. 

Yes...people are willing to give up privacy for little until something happens that bothers them (i.e. their info lands in a shady website or they get hacked). A mentality shift needs to happen in order for things to change.

There have been a lot of suggestions for how to make privacy notices simpler / more understandable:

1.Establish some sort of rating code, so that levels of privacy (A, B, C) could be easily understood.

2. Establish some form of tagging system, making policies machine readable, and let the machines do the coding / rating.

3. Establish privacy zones on the internet (perhaps using new suffixes, like .prv for "private"), which can only be used by those who meet essential standards.

The real problem with all of these is that, on the whole, even though consumers SAY they want privacy protection, they are not willing to DO a lot to protect privacy, and they are willing to GIVE UP privacy for relatively little in return.

now, everyone who believes that's going to happen, please poke out your right eye. Especially if Republicans get elected this November.

I'm not sure what you mean by your comment. Yes, lawyers draw up contracts and terms, but if these terms are to be read by a broad audience, shouldn't the language be suited to that audience?

In what aspects do you see lawyers doing things?

Well I may be wrong on this staement but I feel lawyers do look into things in a different aspect. It may be because of their job role that they have to think the other way round if its wong or right to make things wrong look ight but if so thee is no justice in this world.

Privacy notices should be "clearer, shorter, and more standardized to enable better comprehension and comparison," and companies should provide reasonable and proportionate access according to the type of data they maintain. Companies should also increase efforts to "educate consumers about commercial data privacy practices."

One of the things users don't do is read the privacy notices, and if the language was clearer and simpler, that might change. Use of simple language is common business practice and people don't like to try and navigate legalese.

The FTC has investigated in this area (studies, conferences, reports) for more than a decade, and has taken some actions based on its power to prevent "deceptive" trade practices, but (to date) the FTC has not received a mandate from Congress to regulate directly in the privacy arena.  Indeed, there is no single national privacy-protection agency in the USA.  To a degree, our system of federalism (states' rights) and check-and-balance division of power favors that approach.  But one result is that we have something of a patchwork quilt of privacy laws, which may not always provide adequate protection for individuals, and at the same time can produce uncertainty (and therefore extra cost and burden) for businesses.  The Europeans seem to have the problem in reverse.  There is a supranational privacy directive, which applies to all the EU member states, but each country determines for itself how much enforcement effort to put behind the directive.  And individual states vary in their interpretations of the directive.  The problem of defining and enforcing privacy rights may be inherent in any political system.  Much of the discussion of "co-regulation" of privacy (with industry proposing rules, and government essentially backstopping enforcement of the rules) is an attempt to compromise on that inherent problem.