CenturyLink COO Storey Seeks Consumer Privacy Policy Relief
CenturyLink Chief Operating Officer Jeff Storey argued for government and service providers to relieve consumers from some of the burden associated with privacy policy agreements, while also expressing “high confidence” in maintaining equal internet access for consumers across the world. Storey was asked Monday how companies can help consumers become more technologically literate, in a Q&A session at a Silicon Flatirons event. Storey answered from a consumer standpoint. When deciding how personal information from devices can be used, he said, government and providers should take on some of that privacy terms and conditions burden. Providers, he said, should have to adhere to uniform privacy standards so the consumers aren't expected to read a company’s “75-page document.”
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“They have to check in advance that they adhere to this standard, and I can decide how I want my information distributed,” Storey said. “Some of it, we are going to have to make technology easier, make it simple to use services.”
The former engineer was also asked about fears the internet as a global, interconnected network will become fractured. Moderator Phil Weiser, a professor at University of Colorado-Boulder that hosts Silicon Flatirons, asked if Storey is worried about internet access becoming uneven. The COO expressed confidence the industry will continue adapting, and the internet should be as its name implies: an interconnected network.
“The design and intent is to have very broad ability to connect, whether there are a couple of networks or private networks, whether it’s my home, my iPhone on my hip, the ability to connect to the internet and not fracture,” Storey said, saying he does worry about the volume of IP addresses. “I do worry about 50 billion unique IP addresses trying to connect to the internet every day. I worry about the complexity of the backbone, of the hierarchy, the nature of them and the unintended consequences.” He has “high confidence” in industry ability to solve those problems with software, hardware, design and engineering.
Ex-FTC Chairman William Kovacic, now a professor at George Washington University Law School, argued for adjustments to the Sunshine Act to allow deliberations on matters of policy outside the public’s view. Government ability to adapt and respond to change will suffer without those adjustments, because change will occur only in a “very artificial and strained way,” he said.
Adam Thierer, senior research fellow at George Mason University, said there's a wide gap between industry’s rapid pace of change and government’s failure to keep up. “There is a very serious danger that there is a lack of transparency and accountability and violation of administrative procedures when you don’t go strictly by the book," he said of the current regime of rules affecting tech. "But when you go by the book, you obviously can’t keep pace with that pace of change.”