Campaign urges consumers to "take back" online privacy

The Center for Democracy and Technology, a group that has been a very vocal proponent of federal privacy standards, today launched a "Take Back Your Privacy" campaign to encourage consumers to demand better privacy tools from Internet companies and to push Congress to enact comprehensive privacy legislation.

Leslie Harris, president and CEO of CDT, announced the campaign this morning. I caught up with her to get the details.

What are you hoping to achieve with the campaign?
We want to mobilize Internet users to become more active advocates...and to try to organize more people to demand that Congress enact privacy legislation. We need better and more user-friendly privacy controls from Internet companies, application developers and device manufacturers.

We remain one of the few countries in the developed world that doesn't have some sort of baseline privacy standards...(which is troubling) when more and more personal information is being collected and shared.

What should privacy legislation entail?
It should set a baseline of good, fair information practices. And enforcement. And some private rights of action for consumers and state (attorneys general) to become involved in privacy protection. Both are necessary.

What we envision are transparent, easy-to-find, easy-to-use tools that let people make more decisions about whether information is shared, how is it is shared, under what circumstance, and how you can erase it.

It seems to me that if there is an environment that is driven by innovation, privacy should be a part of the regular product development cycle. We are looking for a much more robust set of privacy-enhancing tools.

We’re looking forward to Internet companies, cellphone companies, Web browsers, to step up. But we're also looking for an environment where independent developers are collaborating on independent tools.

We’d like to see a law that covers online and offline and applies to everybody that collects information about people.

A privacy bill has not yet been circulated on Capitol Hill. How have you been engaged in that process? We have shared our thoughts with the Hill. And the FTC comments we filed in advance of the (Dec. 7 privacy) roundtable capture some of our thoughts.

Any bill has to give the FTC more power to regulate as problems evolve. It’s not going to resolve all privacy concerns. But it should give strong capabilities to the FTC, state AGs and consumers.

Do you think any firm legislation will actually come from all this?
If anything is going to happen, it’s going to happen in 2010.

We’ve got (Rep. Rick) Boucher committeed to a draft of the bill by next year. That will be first time in close to a decade that we’ll have a serious discussion about why we’re the only country without any baseline privacy laws.

We have an FTC and an administration that is going to be more receptive to taking stronger action with respect to privacy. The FTC has more freedom now to start to look at how to be more muscular in their response to this. This should bolster the role of one of the leading agencies in the world.

For the past 10 years, the political environment has been pushing companies to self-regulate. We’re not in an environment where self-regulation is the only solution. We continue to believe it’s part of the solution, particularly if it’s backed up by law and the power of the FTC.

So the FTC needs to have some rule-making authority. It's taken 10 years to build up that role...they've done a lot of aggressive enforcement.

But there's only so much government can do to protect privacy, right?
Consumers have to be the prime solution here. It’s a heavy lift. A lot of people don’t know what they don’t know about the practices online. And if you don’t know, you’re not worried.

We think this is the right time to start (going) out into the Internet to get people to organize and demand new laws and new tools.