Video filming & editing: USEU/Office of Public Affairs, Brussels, Belgium.
David Vladeck, Director of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Bureau of Consumer Protection, participates to a panel discussion in Brussels on transatlantic views on data privacy organized by Edelman|The Centre, in collaboration with the U.S. Mission to the EU (July 13, 2010).
The use and storage of personal data by companies has raised some legitimate questions relating to the protection of privacy and the security of the data itself. As discussions move forward with the coming review of the data protection directive and with the development of social networks and cloud computing services, the roundtable looked at policy development both in the U.S. and the EU.
TRANSCRIPTION: I was here this morning to talk to the Article 29 Group, a group that has been constituted to advise the European Union on privacy issues, and it's composed largely of the heads of or senior staff of the data protection agencies that comprise the European Union. So this is a group expert in data protection, expert on privacy issues, and working on very much the same issues that we're working on in the Federal Trade Commission.
We've spent a lot of energy analyzing how the U.S. approach to privacy differs from the European approach to privacy. And of course there are differences, I don't deny that. But there is much common ground and there are many shared goals.
Indeed, I think if you look at the goals from an aspirational standpoint, what we all want, there's no difference at all between our goals and the goals as we understand them of our European colleagues.
We launched in the United States very much at the same time the EU launched its exploration of privacy, a project to sort of rethink our approach. The first stage was holding three roundtables which solicited and got the participation of the business community, academics, government officials, including government officials from the EU, and consumer groups. So we tried to bring everyone together.
At the first roundtable we talked about the benefits and risks posed to consumers. How consumer information brings benefits by subsidizing the internet, by providing tools that we all use, and by providing more relevant advertising. But how also these advances bring risks, especially the risk of possible misuse of consumer data.
We also discussed the collection and use of data in two specific contexts. The behavioral advertising industry and in the information broker industry. Now the information broker angle is an important one because it represents the effort to consolidate on-line data, tracking data, with off-line information that may be very rich about individual consumers, so we're taking a very hard look at this particular part of the industry. Particularly since although these are very important questions for consumer advocates and stakeholders, these practices are largely invisible to consumers.
We also heard discussions about various approaches to managing the privacy and security of consumer information, including, and these will be no surprise to anyone, the fair information principles, the harm-based approach, sector-specific regulation and self-regulation.
Our second roundtable was held in Berkley, California which was the home of many of our big technology companies. We went to Berkley because we wanted to talk about how technology can enhance but also challenge consumer privacy. A lot of work is going on in Berkeley and in other technology centers to figure out how to better design technology systems to protect privacy. But they also can raise questions about privacy in the context of social networking, [cloud] computing, and again, the mobile environment.
The last roundtable focused on whether we can build security and privacy into the internet after the fact. That is, can we create a secure, authenticated structure on top of the internet foundation that was built to be trusting and open?
Our European counterparts are looking at exactly these questions. They're doing it through an open process. I don't believe they've had the same kind of roundtables we've had, but my understanding is they've very much solicited public comment.
All of our roundtables are on our website. They were all videocast. All of the comments, we received over 200 comments from stakeholders, from academics, from businesses, virtually any entity you can imagine are also available on the web.
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