Future of Privacy

Consumer experiences of job searching and online reputation

Reputation and privacy — Pam Dixon spoke at the Southwestern Law School Privacy Conference on the topic of reputational privacy Friday the 22cnd along with Neville Johnson and Paul Tweed. Dixon highlighted three key consumer situations WPF assisted with recently, discussing the employment challenges consumers faced when harmful material was available online during the job search process.

Principles for Multi-Stakeholder Process (NTIA)

On Feb. 23, 2012, nine signatory organizations published a MultiStakeholder Principles designed to guide the NTIA MultiStakeholder Process, a self-regulatory process to develop voluntary codes of conduct with industry and civil society. The document states: “The US Department of Commerce is proposing a multi-stakeholder process for developing better applications of privacy principles. For the multi-stakeholder process to succeed, it must be representative of all stakeholders and must operate under procedures that are fair, transparent, and credible. We believe the following baseline principles will provide the multi-stakeholder process the legitimacy it needs to succeed.”

Good privacy decision in Amazon v. Lay fight to keep customer information private

Resource | case file — Amazon.com filed a lawsuit in April to fight the North Carolina Department of Revenue’s request for detailed information on Amazon.com customers. The North Carolina tax department requested Amazon.com to hand over “all information for all sales to customers with a North Carolina shipping address” between 2003 to 2010. In the decision, Seattle, Washington U.S. District Court Judge Marsha J. Pechman wrote, “Citizens are entitled to receive information and ideas through books, films, and other expressive materials anonymously.” She also stated that “The fear of government tracking and censoring one\’s reading, listening, and viewing choices chills the exercise of First Amendment rights.” This is an important decision for privacy rights, and online privacy in particular.

Digital Signage Privacy Principles for Consumers: Nation’s leading consumer groups release new privacy principles

Digital Signage Privacy Principles — The nation’s leading consumer and privacy groups released a set of baseline consumer privacy principles to be included in digital signage networks. The principles were released at the Digital Signage Expo in Las Vegas, Nevada, where World Privacy Forum executive director Pam Dixon spoke about the principles to a large group of digital signage industry professionals.