Place-Based Regulation Must Go in New Virtual World, Says Microsoft Executive
BERKELEY, Calif. -- Public policy over rampaging global data flows remains trapped in confusion and conflict defined by geography, a Microsoft executive said. The world must upend its privacy concepts and orient them toward protecting “digital personas” instead of the “physical entities” that they have always concerned, said Dan Reed, the company’s vice president for technology policy.
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And the focus should shift from transactional data to the gigantic information vacuum-cleaners of the Internet of things, Reed said on the University of California campus. People can choose not to use an e-commerce site, even a credit card or a browser, he said late Wednesday; they can’t avoid “the rise of sensors and passive data,” which raise “a whole deeper issue.” He said “unresolved and difficult issues” are raised about whether “all sense of anonymity,” and any ability to control information about oneself in public spaces, has been lost.
The Internet has brought “into collision” what had always been “big cultural islands” around the world, Reed said. A “cultural legacy” from a history of “persecution and death” has colored the EU’s restrictive policies on information control, he said. The U.S. has “a somewhat more pragmatic perspective,” but attitudes seem to vary wildly depending on how questions are framed, Reed said. So, speaking broadly, “the Europeans are over on one side” of the spectrum, Asia and much of the rest of the less-developed world “are on the other side” and “the U.S. is in the middle,” he said.
The most fundamental national interests are at stake in struggles over whose law applies to privacy questions and other matters of control over internationalized data flows, Reed said. They include global economic competitiveness, deep and differing cultural norms, and national security and sovereignty, he said. If the question is whether any particular country’s law applies when the players and activity are scattered across borders, “the answer is yes,” Reed said. He said “every country reaches across its national borders when its citizens are involved” and the Patriot Act “is being used as a fear and uncertainty and doubt issue” in connection with U.S. economic competitiveness.
The U.S. and western Europe have forever lost their dominance of Internet use, Reed said. Whether a new international regulatory structure will turn the Internet into a “top-down managed entity” will come to a head in deliberations this year, capped by the World Conference on International Telecommunications, he said.
Technologies needed to limit how long data exist, discriminate in allowing access and prevent sharing aren’t yet mature, Reed said. Metadata tags providing rules for handling the attached data aren’t nuanced and dynamic, the way the uses are, and “searchable encryption” is required so data can be used in research without being completely exposed, he said.