Hunton & Williams’ Privacy and Information Security Law Blog reported on the FTC’s settlement with two data brokers, Instant Checkmate, Inc. and InfoTrack Information Services, Inc., in connection with those firms’ practices of selling public record information about consumers. The FTC had filed complaints against the 2 companies claiming for “providing reports about consumers to users such as prospective employers and landlords without taking reasonable steps to make sure that they were accurate, or without making sure their users had a permissible reason to have them.” The FTC entered into consent orders with each of the companies (together with payment of fines) requiring future compliance with the Fair Credit Reporting Act.
Mary Ellen Callahan and Esteban M. Morin wrote on the blog of the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP) about a workshop last week hosted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology on the topic of privacy engineering, and in particular, the “lack of clear standards that exist for regulating privacy”. Similar to concepts broadly being espoused by proponents of Privacy by Design, the authors “stressed the importance of organizational structure that emphasizes privacy, the value of developing a ‘culture of privacy’ that raises every employee’s awareness of privacy issues and generally explained how to establish a privacy-protective environment”. For more on Privacy By Design and its concepts and proponents, please see our separate recent blog post here .
Martin Kaste reported on NPR this week about Apple’s recent update to the iPhone’s operating system, where Apple changed its iBeacon tracking system to now be operative even when the user has shut-down a marketer’s app. The change now allows marketers to track customer movements in their stores even when no longer actively using the store’s app. Kaste describes marketers’ perspective on “the nagging problem of how to get customers to open a location-tracking app in the places where it might be useful.” “That problem has now been fixed. … When you close an app, it “deputizes” the phone’s operating system to keep listening for iBeacon signals on its behalf.”
Alex Byers wrote in Politico that Facebook met with several policymakers, regulators, and other interested parties before it recently announced “Friends Nearby”, a new, opt-in feature that will allow users to see online friends who are close by in real-time. Byers quotes Facebook spokeswoman Jodi Seth: “We want people to understand how our service works and what we’re doing to protect the people who use Facebook so we meet regularly”. These meetings included “Washington types” providing feedback, which Facebook applied to its product development. Byers speculated that although privacy hawks will always have their eye on Facebook’s “Timeline”, Facebook’s proactive approach has been received with lots of “likes” from privacy professionals.
Andrea Peterson reported in The Switch that the White House has updated its privacy policy and now you can probably understand it. Nathanial Lubin, the White House’s acting director of digital strategy, announced in a blog post last month that the update would be coming. He wrote, “Our old privacy policy was just that – old”. The few significant changes that can found in the new policy include making clear that the White House does not collect geo-location information. Peterson wrote that the new policy looks much different than the previous version], although many of the policies remain the same but have been stripped of legalese and use simpler terminology.
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