FTC’s Brill Calls Engineers, Computer Scientists ’to Keyboard’ for Consumer Privacy Help
Engineers and computer scientists are crucial to the future of consumer privacy, FTC Commissioner Julie Brill said Wednesday at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University (http://1.usa.gov/1ce7U1y). The data collection process is error-prone, outdated and not consumer friendly, Brill said. These are “your challenges,” she told the academic audience. It’s a call to arms, “or given who you are, a call to keyboard,” she said. With the proliferation of data and tracking through the booming number of connected devices, entrepreneurs have the opportunity to help ensure consumer privacy, Brill said.
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The FTC and government can do only so much to protect consumers, Brill said. “We need more than law, more than best practices to safeguard privacy effectively,” she said. “We need new technical solutions to enhance consumer privacy. This is your technological revolution.” The FTC enforces data protections laws, such as the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), but the law “is not a panacea,” she said. Brill has questioned whether the FCRA, enacted in 1970, is capable of covering all modern data collection techniques (CD Jan 14 p9). Ten million people -- one in 20 consumers -- have errors in their credit reports, she said. But it’s difficult for people to access or resolve these discrepancies, she said. Brill challenged the group to develop technological tools to solve the problems. “You can introduce this critical industry to 21st century techniques for responsible use of big data,” she said.
Engineers can also use the FTC’s “Privacy by Design” guidelines (http://1.usa.gov/H3LgcC) to help create connected devices that “build in privacy from the start,” she said. The Internet of Things lacks enough devices designed to mitigate data collection. “Many connected devices have no user interface, and consumers may not even realize that the device they are using is connected, let alone sending data to third parties,” Brill said. Without that interface, she said, companies can’t effectively notify consumers. She also backed new consumer-friendly platforms, like an “online dashboard that explains through pictures, graphs or other simple terms the data the device collects about consumers, the uses of the data and who else might see the data."
The “toughest challenge” for engineers and computer scientists is data brokers using consumer information for purposes falling outside the boundaries of FCRA, Brill said. For example, some companies create “e-scores” based on an individual’s occupation, salary, home value and spending habits to determine how valuable a consumer is to marketers. This, and other data, can be used to make other “sensitive predictions about consumers,” she said. Two prime examples: Determinations about whether to do business with a consumer and decisions about consumers’ health, she said. “We can easily imagine a company that could develop algorithms that will predict other health conditions -- diabetes, cancer, mental illness -- based on information that, by itself, is innocuous, involving routine transactions -- store purchases, Web searches and social media posts -- and sell that information to marketers and others."
These techniques aren’t necessarily illegal, Brill said, which is why she encouraged the crowd to use FTC’s best practices and improve techniques for de-identifying data. But it goes beyond de-identification, she said. Schools should focus on teaching ethical standards around data collection, said Brill. “The schools and profession should require more systematic ethical training for undergraduate and graduate degrees,” she said. “Law schools do this, and you don’t ever want to be accused of lagging behind lawyers in terms of ethical training.”