ITIF 'Privacy Panic' Report Minimizes Role of Privacy Advocates, Panelists Say
The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation released a report Thursday on the “Privacy Panic Cycle,” named after the phenomenon the report's authors, ITIF IT Vice President Daniel Castro and Research Assistant Alan McQuinn, say occurs when new technologies are introduced. It’s striking how often the same old privacy arguments are brought up when new technology appears, Castro said. Privacy experts who reviewed the report before its release raised some concerns with its findings during an ITIF event Thursday, calling it a road map the government could use to rebut anyone who criticizes its mass surveillance programs.
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When new technology is introduced, privacy fundamentalists or those who value privacy above all else, begin to raise concerns, Castro said. In the next stage, panic begins to increase, he said. Different privacy groups “fan the flames of fear” and the media writes about the concerns because fear is “excellent click-bait,” Castro said. Privacy professionals and organizations profit from this fear, he said. Privacy advocates play an important role in raising concerns, but if they cry "wolf," legitimate concerns are hard to identify, Castro said. Once people get familiar with the technology and understand how it's useful to them, there's a calming effect, he said.
The report could be titled “how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb,” said Act | The App Association Executive Director Morgan Reed, saying what he took away from the report was that privacy wasn’t an issue and that those with privacy concerns should “just shut up because technology is cool.” There's a need for privacy advocates to push back on brilliant tech innovations, he said.
NetChoice Policy Counsel Carl Szabo said he liked that the report called out privacy “overreactions,” noting the decision by privacy groups to leave the NTIA facial recognition multistakeholder process as an example of privacy groups inflating panic. The report creates a bigger discussion on the extremes of worrying and not worrying, Szabo said. When the tech community creates technology, it's not thinking about how to take over the world or exploit people, Szabo said. There's an opportunity for the industry to get ahead of the panic and explain what the technology is before it's released and to self-regulate in the hope of reducing some of that privacy panic, he said.
Mercatus Center Senior Research Fellow Adam Thierer said among the problems he had with the report is a lack of acceptance that privacy is subjective, and he also called unfair the criticism of privacy professionals, the International Association of Privacy Professionals in particular. IAPP isn't made up of “fear entrepreneurs,” Thierer said, but individuals who try to take steps to defuse situations where privacy concerns have been raised. Castro said he agreed not all privacy professionals cry "wolf" on privacy, but he and McQuinn tried to make the broader point in the report that there are a number of institutional factors that accelerate concerns in the public that are not necessarily intentional.