1984 Cable Act Can Help Inform Current Crafting of Privacy Rules

"They were clearly anticipating interactivity” with the Cable Act, said Chief Privacy Officer Gerard Lewis of Comcast. “They were pretty forward looking for the time, and while they have shown some wear and tear … they largely work pretty well.” The type of privacy practice the White House seeks is already done by cable, Lewis said. “We could look to the cable industry as an example and as a way to level the playing field."

It may not make sense for customers to have different expectations of privacy based on what type of service they're using, speakers said. They said the Cable Act applies to video seen on cable, but it doesn’t cover streaming content. “Customers probably don’t think about those two experiences all that differently from a privacy perspective, and they probably shouldn’t have to,” Lewis said. Multichannel video programming distributors have one “set of privacy expectations,” Glist said. For consumers who see “video from an edge provider, nothing covers it,” he said. “Even a statute that was designed to be flexible and where Congress sought to keep technology” updated, “they got outran, ironically, by technology,” Glist said.

A best practice for cable operators that also sell products not explicitly covered by the act is to follow its strictures for various technologies, Lewis said. It’s “probably better to just level your own playing field, play by those stricter standards, and just use them for a baseline,” he said. The act “accommodated the dual-revenue model” of operators getting subscription fees and having ads, Glist said. “It does not proscribe opt-in” for every situation, he said: “It builds in a sense of proportionality and scale, so that not every use is the same” under privacy rules.

"Viewers Want To Interact,” said a slide from Canoe Chief Privacy Officer Lou Mastria, who said they also want to have a “foundation of trust” about keeping their information confidential. Privacy’s a priority for Canoe because it’s important to operators who want a good brand image in the minds of subscribers so they'll use interactive TV, he said. “By creating privacy, we are really enabling a whole new ecosystem for advertising on TV,” Mastria said: Without it, “we risked … potentially alienating our consumers."

IAPP Summit Notebook

As facial recognition and facial detection technology emerges, the technology industry is proceeding cautiously when it comes to privacy, experts said Thursday at an International Association of Privacy Professionals conference in Washington. “With facial recognition, you can do more than just identify an individual,” said Harley Geiger, policy counsel at the Center for Democracy & Technology. With it “you can pull associated online content about the individual,” including blog posts the person wrote and social network profiles, he said. Facial recognition technology “fundamentally changes the dynamic of private and public,” he said. The FTC will release a report this year summarizing the findings from last year’s facial recognition workshop, said Maneesha Mithal, the agency’s associate director-privacy and identity protection. “A lot of companies are deploying this technology with privacy by design.” There’s recognition that people don’t want their customers to be surprised, she said. “Therefore, services are being rolled out on an opt-in basis.” Given privacy risks, the potential for abuse and lack of federal laws addressing the risks, baseline privacy laws are needed, Geiger said. Baseline laws should include a safe harbor where companies “adhere to a code of conduct that offers tangible incentives” for complying with a set of privacy principles, he said.

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The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation’s Cross-border Privacy Rules offer a wide range of benefits to participating economies, said panelists at the privacy conference Thursday. The U.S. will apply to be part of the program later this year, and the FTC will play the role of government enforcement for those rules in the U.S., said FTC Commissioner Edith Ramirez. In order for an economy to apply for APEC certification, it must go through the necessary steps in the application process and must demonstrate legal authority and government enforcement of the rules, she said. TRUSTe will offer a lot of analysis and evaluation of the participating companies’ practices, said John Tomaszewski, TRUSTe corporate secretary. The rules will offer a “tremendous number of benefits” and will allow consumer protection and advantages for companies, said Hewlett Packard Chief Privacy Officer Scott Taylor.