US Will Consider Data Privacy Legislation

US Will Consider Data Privacy Legislation

After information breaches and tracking cookies have been discovered by the community and the government, they both began to worry about the privacy implications coming with the issue. That was the reason why Director of the Consumer Privacy Project at the Center for Democracy & Technology in Washington discussed a proposed privacy reform.

For nearly a decade now the government has been ignoring this problem, until a spate of legislation was introduced, specifically designed to offer consumers their rights over how their data should be gathered and shared.

The House of Representatives has introduced two separate comprehensive bills, while the Senate also proposed the Commercial Privacy Bill of Rights pursuing similar goals. At the same time, the Senate Commerce Committee held a hearing over privacy issue, followed by the Energy and Commerce Committee, which also discussed the topic next week. As you can see, there were a lot of good signs from both parties.

The interest of Congress upon the issue can be easily explained: Turkey and the United States appeared to be the only developed countries lacking comprehensive legislation that would protect consumer privacy. For example, the United States has a couple of sector-specific laws regarding sensitive data over health and finance, but for everything else, there are no rules for the corporations except “don’t lie about how you share information.”

While the Federal Trade Commission is doing what it can to enforce such prohibition, risk-averse lawyers admit that the only way to not violate the above mentioned rule is simply to not make explicit privacy promises at all. However, it’s unclear what would happen to the corporate privacy policies – today the corporations do reserve the right to use, sell or share your data, and you are unable to really find out what they do with your privacy information. The reason is that the current legislation encourages corporations not to make concrete disclosures.

In fact, the problem wasn’t so deep within the past decade. But now, in our digital era, social networking and data storage pose much higher risks. Compared to a few years ago, when just a couple major sites could drop a cookie to “anonymously” track your activities, now one might be the owner of hundreds of trackers knowing their offline identity. So, where all the data go?