Blog Post

OECD | Fair Information Practices — At a key meeting of the OECD on the future of the Internet economy, the OECD Secretary General Angel Gurria reaffirmed support of the 1980 OECD Privacy Principles. Also, Secretary General Angel Gurria expressed support for formalizing the participation of civil society in OECD going forward and for paying more attention to information security and identity theft problems. Secretary General Gurria noted that “A more decentralised, networked approach to policy formulation for the Internet Economy that includes the active participation of stakeholders needs to be the norm.” Many parts of the recent OECD meeting may be viewed online.

Genetic privacy — The World Privacy Forum participated in a Council for Responsible Genetics (CRG) conference on genetic databases at New York University. The groundbreaking conference focused on key issues of race and genetic databases, fairness, accuracy, and privacy. The World Privacy Forum discussed a paper by Dr. Harry G. Levine, Drug Arrests and DNA, noting that innocent victims of medical identity theft may be arrested for the “drug seeking behavior” of the criminals impersonating them.

Financial privacy — The World Privacy Forum filed comments with the Federal Trade Commission today about its proposed study of credit -based pricing practices for homeowners insurance. The World Privacy Forum requested that the FTC ask insurers if there are specific procedures in place for detecting, mitigating, and responding to consumers who have been victims of identity theft. The WPF noted its support for the FTC’s use of the FTC Act Section 6(b) authority to acquire robust information from the insurance companies.

Internet privacy — The World Privacy Forum, Privacy Rights Clearinghouse and EPIC were joined by California-based EFF, the ACLU of Northern California, Consumer Action, Consumer Federation of California and other national groups in asking Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt to provide a prominent link to the Google privacy policy directly from its home page. Google has recently been criticized for not providing a link to its privacy policy from its home page, as the California Online Privacy Protection Act requires. The groups noted that linking to a privacy policy on a home page is considered a widespread best practice.

– A coalition of privacy and consumer organizations from California to Washington, D.C. have urged Google to post a prominent link on its homepage to its privacy policy. In a letter released Tuesday, the groups say this is required by California law and is the widespread practice of commercial web sites.