School of Information professor Deirdre Mulligan has submitted an official comment to the federal Internet Policy Task Force for their study of online privacy and innovation.
The Department of Commerce's Internet Policy Task Force is conducting a comprehensive review of the nexus between privacy policy and innovation in the Internet economy.
As part of this review, the department is soliciting public comment from all Internet stakeholders, including the commercial, academic and civil society sectors, on the impact of current privacy laws on the pace of innovation in the information economy. After analyzing the comments, the department intends to issue a report to contribute to the administration’s domestic policy and international engagement in the area of Internet privacy.
In her comment to the task force, Mulligan responds to the claim made by some Internet companies that free-market competition alone will solve the problem, since consumers can simply move to a competing service whose privacy practices they prefer. "Competition is only a click away," according to Google and others.
Mulligan and other scholars have discussed the importance of easily-accessible, understandable privacy policies, and have lobbied for making those policies standardized and machine-readable, to make privacy decisions part of the fabric of the Internet.
In this comment, she also underlines the importance of other regulations to fuel real, robust competition on privacy, including portability of online personal data and the interoperability of online services. "Data portability and service interoperability must be touchstones of a privacy framework," according to Mulligan.
Last month, Mulligan presented at a daylong symposium sponsored by the task force in Washington, D.C. At the symposium, she addressed "Privacy on the Ground," based on her research into how law and other forces shape the operationalization of privacy within corporations. She also discusses this research in her recent law review article, "Privacy on the Books and on the Ground."
