Randall Rothenberg: August 2008 Archives

What is the definition of “your data”? The answer may determine the future of the Internet – and, more broadly, of communications media, the users that derive value from them, and the marketers that depend on them.

The combination of the word “data” or “information” with a personal possessive pronoun lies at the heart of the current debate over interactive advertising and privacy. In the Monday New York Times story “Web Privacy on the Radar in Congress,” reporter Stephanie Clifford wrote that a subject of her piece knows that companies “are collecting his data.” The Center for Democracy and Technology, the prominent Washington-based proponent of a Federally mandated “do not track list” against interactive advertising, told the Los Angeles Times recently that Americans are “uncomfortable” with “the collection of their data.” The Federal Trade Commission, in proposing principles to control “behavioral advertising,” recommends that “consumers can choose whether or not to have their information collected for such purpose.” Democratic Congressman Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts said yesterday that he expects to introduce legislation during the coming year that “includes a set of legal guarantees that consumers have with respect to their information."

All well and good, you might say: My identity must be protected from thieves and exploiters. But guess what? The plans that these activists and their enablers are promoting have nothing to do with identity protection. To the contrary, they are agitating – some, perhaps, unwittingly -- for a new property right, unique in U.S. law, that would provide consumers personal ownership of all information that derives from their activities, no matter how anonymous, non-identifying, aggregated, or otherwise impersonal it may be. They are further proposing that the Government, as the codifier and protector of such rights, use this definition of “behavioral data” to assert Federal control over most Internet operations. The effect could be to cripple the architecture of the World Wide Web.