How two almost rights can become awfully wrong – managing consumer data privacy
Privacy issues online are a daily occurrence; so much so that I get the feeling that for many of us personal privacy is the Titanic in our connected world, and that we might as well abandon it in favour of the iceberg that is big data, and go with the flow. That’s certainly inherent in the naming of Facebook’s new app as 'Home', an indicator of just how much access we have already given away.
Paris Brown lost her job as Kent's youth police commissioner
Last week, however, it was our online history or ‘‘right to be forgotten’’ that was brought into sharp focus. As Kent’s new youth police commissioner discovered this weekend, all those ill-conceived comments and photos that you shared so innocently online have a habit of coming back to haunt you.
Currently there is a fight going on between the UK and EU as to how best legislate one’s ‘right to be forgotten’. Whilst occasionally ‘good’ does come from the EU, like having to opt-in to email, much of the industry is still feeling the sting of the cookie bill, which became a non-issue for consumers, and could have been dealt with without draconian (and unenforceable and expensive) legislation.
In the ‘Right’ corner, Article 17 of the proposed EU act believes that everyone should have the right to remove their digital debris. It will be the service providers’ responsibility to not only promptly comply, but also contact any other third party with whom the content has been shared (!). And for non-compliance, a fine of up to 2 per cent of gross turnover will be applied (!!). This is another potentially unenforceable and extremely expensive regulation, especially for online services that haven’t had to face these issues on a regular basis.
In the other ‘Right’ corner is the UK. The government claims that this is too much of a burden on business and that we in the UK and (other individual countries) should have the right to make their own laws to deal with it; and that the individual should be made personally responsible for contacting each service. This means that businesses may have to deal with at least 27 local variations of the above - which is also problematic.
• Worse when the real trolls get a hold of you with legislation to sue you, and start marketing their cleansing services on a no-win no-fee basis. They love going after middle-tier businesses, as they are often happy to settle out of court.
• What fun we’ll have dealing with fake takedown notices as is rife with the DMCA in the US. Split up with your boyfriend? Get him removed from the web!
• It will be abused as an easy way to censor the internet. What if somebody quoted you in a damning article? Or like Reading East MP Rob Wilson, you mistakenly retweeted a link. Redactiontastic! They say they want to protect freedom of expression but actually the best way to do that is to allow people to express themselves freely, not make ‘an exemption’, which is one of the key criticisms of the bill.
3. If you are a socially driven startup - be it reviews, comment or community - this could potentially be disastrous; add ‘data deletion' into your 'Mimimum Viable Product'.
6. Double check that when you say you are deleting something it's actually gone. This is often much harder than you think, especially with search engine caches, the Internet Archive and the recently launched UK libraries archive all trying to preserve the data, not destroy it!
Jon Bains is a partner at business futures practice Atmosphere
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