Mobile Location Data Pinpointed as Central in Discussion of Boucher Privacy Bill
STANFORD, Calif. -- The handling of mobile location information in a new draft bill by Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Va., was the hot button issue in a privacy discussion last week at the Legal Frontiers in Digital Media conference. President Pam Horan of the Online Publishers Association expressed qualms about a provision that information about a person’s precise location be treated as sensitive information subject to a requirement of express opt-in. She called the data crucial to location-based services. Precise location information “adds a ton of great value” to ads, agreed Matthew Carr, general manager of Microsoft Advertising. Targeted ads “could be the final blow” to newspaper circulars, he said. But “we won’t get out of the gate on this” if the use and privacy of data aren’t handled properly, Carr said.
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Boucher’s bill could become the platform for an attempt to extend the customer proprietary network information rules on carriers “across the ecosystem of all the players that could be collecting location information,” said Alyssa Cooper, Center for Democracy & Technology chief computer scientist. “I'm not sure it succeeds.” The effort would be a recognition that “suddenly you have all these players who collect all this sensitive information.”
"Privacy takes a whole different nomenclature” in mobile communications, said Halimah DeLaine Prado, Google product counsel. Publishers “need to be mindful of what you might think is benign information” for collection and commercial use “that could turn out to be personally identifiable information,” Prado said.
Horan praised an exception in the bill to its privacy requirements for cookies concerning those used for website operations. And overall, “it’s nice to see something finally on paper that we can begin to work off.” She said Boucher, who hasn’t been able to get the bill moving as quickly as he has wanted, may not achieve his goal of introducing it in September. “Those timetables … are up for grabs,” Horan said. Although much of the draft is clear, “there’s some of it that we feel does need further clarification,” she said.
"We all have to be accountable to be sure the consumer is comfortable” online, Horan said. Nicole Ozer, technology and civil liberties policy director of the ACLU of Northern California, said it’s “good for business” for companies to respond to expressed privacy worries regardless of the legal requirements. “There’s compliance, and then there’s doing what makes sense both for consumers and for your business,” she said, pointing to “blowback” against Facebook and Google Buzz as negative examples. CDT’s Cooper agreed. But there’s broad interest in Congress to do something that makes consumers more confident and gives businesses increased certainty about the rules, Ozer said.
Horan said the industry has done itself “a disservice” by failing to get across to consumers how little they have to worry about. “I'm not hearing a big hue and cry from American consumers,” said Lincoln Millstein, Hearst Newspapers senior vice president for digital media. “I think by and large they know what they're getting into. They've made that bargain.” He conceded that “granted, it’s a little creepy” being served an ad for the Toyota dealership in his hometown of Greenwich, Conn., when he’s in San Francisco. But “that’s not something that keeps me up at night worrying,” Millstein said.
Ozer replied that when users see content billed as free “having a cost down the line” to their privacy, “they get very angry.” They should get upfront the information they need to do a “cost-benefit analysis” of the tradeoff of information about them for access to content, she said.
Google has been happy with the results of use of privacy notices directly in ads, Prado said. “Users appreciate that kind of transparency.”