The Obama Administration’s Silence on Privacy - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

Description

The Obama administration is trying to take the lead on a number of technology issues, including cybersecurity, network neutrality and broadband availability. But one prominent omission is privacy, a topic about which the administration has said very little.

At the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference in Washington on Tuesday, one administration official did address privacy somewhat. Susan Crawford, a member of the National Economic Council looking after science and technology policy, listed some of the efforts by the Federal Trade Commission to press for new rules for behavioral advertising. But she didn’t mention that all of those rules were written under the Bush administration.

Peter Swire, an Ohio State law professor who served on the Obama transition team, offered one reason it might be difficult for the administration to find its voice on privacy. There is a split, he told the conference, between the typical view of privacy among technology experts and the emerging view of people brought up in the social networking, Web 2.0 world.

“The Web 2.0 movement is opposed to the privacy movement,” he said. Traditionally, privacy advocates have pushed for a policy of “data minimization,” he argued. The less information kept about people, this theory goes, the less there is for government or corporations to use to hurt individuals.

The new ideology revolves around what Mr. Swire called “data empowerment.” People assemble and control information about themselves through online social networking and other sites. And access to data can create political and social movements, just as volunteers met each other and organized during the Obama presidential campaign.

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http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/02/the-obama-adminstrations-silence-on-privacy/

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/02/the-obama-adminstrations-silence-on-privacy/