President Obama's defense of the government's collection of phone records and Internet traffic may not appease staunch privacy advocates.
Jody R. Westby, adjunct computer science professor at Georgia Institute of Technology, would prefer that Obama call for "a full investigation to ensure that no laws have been stretched or broken."
Should the wide exposure of the government's Internet and telephone records data mining projects prompt a similar reaction among the general public, the tech giants that generate and store this data very well might be compelled to adjust their business models, going forward.
Americans have always been willing to know that some crimes will take place simply because people are acting undetected, but the rule of law, based on police, courts, and prosecutors to keep the public safe works well, says Westby, who is also CEO at consultancy Global Cyber Risk LLC.
"Whatever happened to that line of thinking? It is an odd twist of affairs when a liberal Democrat, such as Obama, is defending encroachments on civil liberties, while a Republican senator, Rand Paul, has already introduced a bill to limit such activities," Westby says.
The rising tide of sensitive consumer data swelling storage servers at the top tech companies can be traced directly to our love affair with our smartphones and touch tablets and fascination with social media.
Data mining of our online haunts, preferences, acquaintances and world views has reached an unprecedented level of sophistication. This is due to a powerful, seemingly unstoppable profit driver: targeted advertising revenue.
This giant force has been gathering volume and richness for more than a decade. That's how long the online advertising industry, dominated by Google, has been taking note of where you go and what you search for on the Web — without your permission. And today many of the personal details you voluntarily divulge on popular websites and social networks are being similarly tracked and analyzed.
The tracking data culled from your Internet searches and surfing routinely gets commingled with the information you disclose at websites for shopping, travel, health or jobs. And many of the personal disclosures you make on popular social networks, along with the preferences you may express via all those nifty Web applications that trigger cool services on your mobile devices, often gets tossed into the mix.
As digital shadowing escalates, so too have concerns about the erosion of traditional notions of privacy. Privacy advocates have long fretted that health companies, insurers, lenders, employers, lawyers, regulators and law enforcement could begin to acquire detailed profiles derived from tracking data to use unfairly against people. Indeed, new research shows that as tracking technologies advance, and as more participants join the burgeoning tracking industry, the opportunities for privacy invasion are rising.
Europe has taken a hard stand to boost consumer privacy rights in this environment. Google, Facebook and other U.S. players could be fined up to 2% of global annual revenue for violating the new rule designed to preserve individuals' privacy,
Meanwhile, U.S. tech, telecom and online advertising industries continue to aggressively pursue more ways to track and monetize consumers' online behaviors — the better to sell targeted ads. This includes intense lobbying to get Congress to back off on proposed Do Not Track legislation that would empower consumers to instruct web companies not to track them online.
But the disclosures about how the rich data collected to support advertising can get systematically routed to government intelligent agencies could stir Congress to revisit the issue, says Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the non-profit Electronic Privacy Information Center.
"Congress thought the privacy problem would solve itself, and that the " says Rotenberg. "But it didn't work. Now Congress needs to step up and pass privacy laws for the Internet age."
Alan Paller, research director at The SANS Institute, a respected cyber security training center and think tank, says Congress should not interfere with the collection and storage of consumer data. From a security standpoint, the availability of rich data to monitor the planning and movements of bad guys is invaluable, he says.
"You cannot fight cyber crime or terrorism without evidence. The gathering of this data is important," Paller says. "But you have to have watchdogs in place to control what's being done with the data."
Paller contends that Congress should limit its role to "ensuring that the data that's gathered isn't used inappropriately."
News Source: http://www.usatoday.com/story/cybertruth/2013/06/07/data-mining-prism-targeted-advertising-controversy/2402351/
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