SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Submitted via IRC for Fnord666_
The Trump administration is working on a set of data privacy protections, the Washington Post reports, and according to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, officials have held 22 meetings with more than 80 companies and groups since last month. Companies like Facebook, Google, AT&T and Comcast have been involved, according to four Washington Post sources familiar with the matter. The short-term goal is to deliver a data privacy proposal -- including how data should be collected and handled and what rights consumers have regarding that data -- which could serve as a guide for lawmakers as they consider legislation.
Axios reported last month that the White House was looking into a data privacy plan, meeting with groups like the Information Technology Industry Council, a trade group representing companies such as Apple, Google and Facebook, and The Business Roundtable, a lobbying group that hosts tech CEOs like Apple's Tim Cook, IBM's Virginia Rometty and Verizon's Lowell McAdam.
"Through the White House National Economic Council, the Trump Administration aims to craft a consumer privacy protection policy that is the appropriate balance between privacy and prosperity," Lindsay Walters, the president's deputy press secretary, told the Washington Post. "We look forward to working with Congress on a legislative solution consistent with our overarching policy."
The draft proposal also asks Congress to devise a law that would preempt any state laws, notable as California has just passed its own set of data privacy regulations. Vermont has taken on data privacy through legislation as well.
The White House is reportedly working to have its data privacy plan set this fall. Meanwhile, multiple lawmakers have now introduced their own data privacy bills in both the Senate and the House of Representatives.
Source: https://www.engadget.com/2018/07/27/white-house-federal-data-privacy-policy/
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 29 2018, @08:24PM
You have to consider the timing. It's coming this Fall. There are relatively important elections coming this November, and it looks like they're planning to release this just before them. They wouldn't be releasing it at that time if they planned to have anything in it that might be able to be seen as e.g. pandering to corporations. So it's going to at least be 'not bad.'
In the worst case I'd expect a good bill with major loopholes. For instance if the bill requires that individuals must be able to query what information a company has collected from them and have that information deleted unless it's critical to the operation of the system, that leaves a huge whopping loophole. Generated metadata is derived from collected information, not collected information itself. You state in a post, "I like nachos." The company AI links your preferences to include nachos. You ask what information the company has collected from you. It includes that post. You request it deleted. Sure, they delete it - it's irrelevant now that the metadata has been generated. You request all personally identifiable information be deleted. They happily oblige, well - except for your phone number (which you either registered with, or setup as a two factor authentication device) and other personal details - those are critical to the operation of the system and, conveniently, also work as 100% certainty authenticators when companies trade and sell your information between each other to expand their profile of you.