FCC's Net Neutrality Public Comment Database Poses Exposure Risk, Bot Problem, Says TPI
The FCC, which has a public database of more than 5 million net neutrality comments with filers' names, addresses and email addresses, should collect only personally identifiable information (PII) it needs and de-identify data made public, wrote Technology Policy Institute…
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research fellow Sarah Oh and research associate Brandon Silberstein in a RealClearPolicy commentary. "If there is one saving grace to the FCC’s public disclosure problem, it’s that its system is so bad that it’s hard to know which comments are real and which are machine-generated," they wrote. Bot-generated comments are also a problem and the FCC should use CAPTCHA technology or require users to create accounts to verify that humans are actually submitting comments, they wrote. Groups on both sides of the net neutrality issue are claiming hundreds of thousands of comments from either side are phony (see 1705310019). Oh and Silberstein wrote the FCC should follow FTC recommendations on data accuracy and security, collection limit and retention practices. The FCC's system has no privacy safeguards and may be collecting more PII than it needs, they said. "The highly publicized nature of the net neutrality-Title II proceedings simply serves to increase the exposure risk," they said.