The most telling moment of last week’s Global Privacy Summit in Washington D.C. came in the final hour of the conference last Friday when one of the participants, U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) member Mozelle W. Thompson, asked the large audience of businesses representatives and privacy advocates a simple question: How many believe online privacy legislation is inevitable? A sea of hands was raised.
There was little doubt among most participants that comprehensive online data privacy legislation will arrive soon and although many businesses are continuing to press for self-regulation, there were some corporate executives – such as Bill Catucci, executive vice-president of Atlanta-based credit reporting giant Equifax Inc. in Atlanta – who now view government regulation as one of the main pieces of the overall data-privacy picture.
Catucci said there’s a need “to strike a balance” between a company’s need for information and a consumer’s right to privacy. Achieving that will take a three-part solution, he added: self-regulation, government regulation and consumer empowerment, which Catucci said may involve giving them the ability to keep their personal data private.
The government, Catucci said, should support companies that practice reasonable “cyber principles” and impose sanctions on those that refuse to subscribe to them.
For its part, the FTC already is pushing Congress to enact legislation regarding online privacy, although lawmakers aren’t expected to take action on the issue until next year at the earliest. “I think that there should be some baseline, and for companies that are doing the right thing, the ones that actually say and practice what they preach about protecting information, they [will] have nothing to worry about,” Thompson said.
What worries Steve Emmert, director of government affairs at Reed Elsevier Inc., the London-based firm that owns the Lexis-Nexis information service, is the potential effect that the political process may have on any future laws. “What seems to strike a fair balance is very much at risk, and it’s at risk because of a lot of the political forces involved,” he said.