1984 Cable Act Can Help Inform Current Crafting of Privacy Rules
The cable industry has faced privacy rules for longer than other sectors, with the 1984 Cable Act the first U.S. statute to mandate fair information practices, executives said Thursday. As this Congress and administration are focused on the issue of privacy across communications platforms, cable lawyer Paul Glist of Davis Wright suggested the Cable Act got much of the balance right between protecting information and allowing operators to aggregate and otherwise use data. “It speaks to the requirements according to pertinent uses,” he said at an International Association of Privacy Professionals conference in Washington. Speakers from Comcast and Canoe Ventures, an interactive ad venture of that company and the five next-largest U.S. operators, also addressed how they think the act is still relevant.
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"They were clearly anticipating interactivity” with the Cable Act, said Chief Privacy Officer Gerard Lewis of Comcast. “They were pretty forward looking for the time, and while they have shown some wear and tear … they largely work pretty well.” The type of privacy practice the White House seeks is already done by cable, Lewis said. “We could look to the cable industry as an example and as a way to level the playing field."
It may not make sense for customers to have different expectations of privacy based on what type of service they're using, speakers said. They said the Cable Act applies to video seen on cable, but it doesn’t cover streaming content. “Customers probably don’t think about those two experiences all that differently from a privacy perspective, and they probably shouldn’t have to,” Lewis said. Multichannel video programming distributors have one “set of privacy expectations,” Glist said. For consumers who see “video from an edge provider, nothing covers it,” he said. “Even a statute that was designed to be flexible and where Congress sought to keep technology” updated, “they got outran, ironically, by technology,” Glist said.
A best practice for cable operators that also sell products not explicitly covered by the act is to follow its strictures for various technologies, Lewis said. It’s “probably better to just level your own playing field, play by those stricter standards, and just use them for a baseline,” he said. The act “accommodated the dual-revenue model” of operators getting subscription fees and having ads, Glist said. “It does not proscribe opt-in” for every situation, he said: “It builds in a sense of proportionality and scale, so that not every use is the same” under privacy rules.
"Viewers Want To Interact,” said a slide from Canoe Chief Privacy Officer Lou Mastria, who said they also want to have a “foundation of trust” about keeping their information confidential. Privacy’s a priority for Canoe because it’s important to operators who want a good brand image in the minds of subscribers so they'll use interactive TV, he said. “By creating privacy, we are really enabling a whole new ecosystem for advertising on TV,” Mastria said: Without it, “we risked … potentially alienating our consumers.”