More Legal Issues about Privacy (and GPS)
Privacy continues to be hot news, just look at Facebook’s S-1 disclosures in its Initial Public Offering (IPO) which among a myriad of “Risk Factors” includes this statement about privacy laws:
Our business is subject to complex and evolving U.S. and foreign laws and regulations regarding privacy, data protection, and other matters. Many of these laws and regulations are subject to change and uncertain interpretation, and could harm our business;
As well, Facebook confessed there is risk for their IPO regarding the privacy of the 845 million users with this statement:
…there are changes in user sentiment about the quality or usefulness of our products or concerns related to PRIVACY and sharing, safety, security, or other factors.
For more discussion about privacy issues, please read my recent eCommerce Times column entitled “GPS, Privacy and the Supreme Court” which expands my blog about the 9-0 ruling from the Supreme Court in Jones v. US.
Privacy issues will continue to be in the headlines, so stay tuned for more blogs.
As the public becomes better educated about the private information kept by online businesses, it will be interesting to see how the balance between convenience and government intrusiveness gets struck. I can easily imagine that convenience and personalization will be perceived as so desirable that considerable legal protections could be effectively waived. This is the tension between the sublime animal spirits of a raw market--the completely unregulated Internet--and a bureaucracy that champions, and by necessity polices, certain interests which, when we agree with them, we call rights. A fascinating dialectic plays itself out in a new incarnation.