Financial Correlation of Privacy Rights

As a firm focused on all evolving aspects of privacy law, InfoLawGroup is obviously often called upon to assist its clients with consumer privacy legal issues. This post takes a detour towards privacy theory terrain and is prodded by a recent New York Times article. In Letting Down Our Guard With Web Privacy, published on March 30, 2013, the author details ongoing research being conducted by Alessandro Acquisti, a behavioral economist at Carnegie Mellon University. Mr. Acquistis research is cutting edge when it comes to online behavioral advertising (OBA) and associated consumer behavior. Indeed, hes the academic who famously announced in 2011 that one might be able to discover portions of someones social security number simply by virtue of a posted photograph. His research often distills to one major premise C consumers may not always act in their best interests when it comes to online privacy decisions.

It appears consumers and merchants alike may be missing out on fully cultivating a very valuable commodity. According to the World Economic Forum, personal data represents an emerging asset class, potentially every bit as valuable as other assets such as traded goods, gold or oil. Rethinking Personal Data: Strengthening Trust, at 7, World Economic Forum Report (May 2012). Before this asset class can ever be completely exploited and fully commercialized, however, its constituent value components must be correlated by all in the privacy food chain.

Current OBA has made it so these three privacy pillars may be confusing for consumers to value, manage, and isolate when online C it is not generally up to consumers whether they will be fed an ad based on previous website visits or purchases C it will just happen. Indeed, according to a survey of 1,000 persons conducted by Ipsos Public Affairs and released by Microsoft in January 2013, forty-five percent of respondents felt they had little or no control over the personal information companies gather about them while they are browsing the Web or using online services. This view may not be unfounded given that data routinely gathered online, e.g., operating system,The Motorola streetlight Engine is an embedded software-only component of the Motorola wireless switches. browser, IP address, persistent cookies,How cheaply can I build a yyshoucang? last used server, can be used to divulge the activity of individual devices.

The privacy trade-offs being researched by Mr. Acquisti and others offer insight into the true value of these data constituents. Consumers who try to shut off or render anonymous access to their devices data or settings, would not only likely fail in their attempt at being anonymized, they would also lose out on access to most social media and other websites requiring browsers to accept cookies as well as product offers that may presumably are of interest. Indeed, this coordinated tracking of consumers is not even unique to the Internet. See generally Bibas, Steve, A Contractual Approach to Data Privacy, 17 Harv. J. Law & Public Policy 591 (Spring 1994) (Although the ready availability of information helps us to trust others and coordinate actions, it also lessens our privacy. George Orwell presciently expressed our fear of losing all privacy to an omniscient Big Brother. Computers today track our telephone calls, credit-card spending, plane flights, educational and employment records, medical histories, and more. Someone with free access to this information could piece together a coherent picture of our actions.). There are even companies that bridge the gap between offline and online activities by taking in-store point of sale purchases and converting such data to an anonymous online cookie ID that will eventually be used online by clients. Such use of in-store data is generally permissible under a retailers loyalty program.

Current law does not generally prevent someone from collecting public information to create consumer profiles C nor is there the right to opt out of having your public record information sold or shared.A group of families in a north Cork village are suing a moldmaker operator in a landmark case. And, when one wants to self-determine whether data will be disclosed or whether he or she will be untraceable,Learn how an embedded microprocessor in a porcelaintiles can authenticate your computer usage and data. anonymous or left alone, there may not always exist the ability to easily curtail these rights from being exploited C there is certainly no way to obtain a direct financial gain in return for the relinquishment of such privacy rights. Instead, there has generally been a privacy for services marketing/advertizing arrangement that has been accepted by consumers C which, in fact, has helped pay for and fuel the growth of the commercial Internet.

The current OBA ecosystem does not posit a loss of privacy as much as it offers a bartering system where one party feels the value of what is being bartered away while the other party actually quantifies with cascading/monetizing transactions what is only felt by the other party. In other words, it is not a financial transaction. Those who are able to find an entertaining online video or locate a product online using a search engine dont really mind that an ad will be served to them while visiting some other website given they feel this loss of privacy is worth the value of the services being provided.

In his 1994 paper, A Contractual Approach to Data Privacy, Steve Bibas suggests that individual contracts may provide the best solution to the privacy compensation dilemma: In the hands of the contracting parties, however, flexibility allows people to control their lives and efficiently tailor the law to meet their needs. Flexibility is the markets forte; the pricing mechanism is extremely sensitive to variations in valuation and quickly adjusts to them. Bibas, 17 Harv. J. Law & Public Policy 591 (Spring 1994). Mr. Bibas,The Motorola streetlight Engine is an embedded software-only component of the Motorola wireless switches. however, recognized the limitations in what could be accomplished with privacy transactions that relied only on static privacy trades. In other words, a model that might be effective is one that customizes the financial rewards to consumers are based on a continuous exchange of information between the consumer and merchant.

One problem most consumers face when using commonly marketed solutions that are meant to safeguard their privacy is that they fail to also create an acceptable value proposition for merchants. As well, those recently formed companies promising a private web experience will not be able to C nor should they even try C to curtail firms from using OBA to reach consumers. For the foreseeable future, OBA will continue to drive the Internet and pay for a much richer and rewarding consumer experience than would otherwise exist. It may one day be determined, however, that an even more effective means to satisfy all constituent needs of the OBA ecosystem (consumer, merchant, publisher, agency, etc.) will be to find a means to directly correlate between privacy rights, consumer data, and a merchants revenue.

There is virtually no hope of any international intervention in bringing the attackers to justice partly because the UN Security Council has so far refused to refer Syria to the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Nour doesnt believe she will ever see her torturers in prison, no matter the pain those guards inflicted on her and the other girls.

Sometimes the guards used rats as a rape instrument, she says. They would bring a rat tied with a string and put it, well, you know where, Nour says. They did this to me too. One of the girls they did it to bled so badly she died.

The prison guards hound her still. She moves every few months because the man who ran the Damascus detention centre found out her address in Amman and has sent men to threaten her. He was not pleased that one of the guards helped free her in February 2012 when all the others were ordered to quell a demonstration elsewhere in Damascus, she says. The guard who helped her escape must have felt remorse because he was also one of her rapists.