By Fran Maier
President and Executive Chair
TRUSTe
I had the honor of attending the 30th Anniversary of the OECD Privacy Guidelines yesterday in Paris. Wonderful speakers including Michael Kirby who is credited with driving their creation. He provided terrific insights on how they approached these issues way back in 1980. These privacy guidelines, adopted 30 years ago by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, have shaped both national and international privacy frameworks and laws, allowing businesses, governments and consumer advocates to protect personal information while avoiding unnecessary constraints on transborder data exchanges.
Impressively, these guidelines have withstood the test of time despite numerous transformative changes to the technological and social landscape, most notably in the creation of the Internet. The challenge for these guidelines going forward is their continued application and implementation.
Here are my takeaways on the OECD Privacy Guidelines:
- They balanced the importance of privacy with the benefits of the free flow of information. This was not a “privacy at all costs” document, but one that strove to maintain consumer trust in commerce (of course they didn’t use the word e-commerce in 1980)
- They are principles and guidelines, not prescriptions, laws or process requirements. This flexible approach has allowed them to adapt over time.
- They were not tied to a specific technology, the principles recognized the fast changing nature of commerce and technology
- They understood that data flows could not easily be contained so their scope needed to be global in nature.
- They have become the basis of privacy law not only within OECD countries, but now are the basis for the APEC privacy initiatives
- They used simple language. Oracle’s Joe Alhadeff spoke eloquently on how the simple language increased their overall accessibility
The OECD Privacy Principles have guided TRUSTe in the development of its privacy program requirements. In fact, TRUSTe is born out of the last principle, accountability. Our clients look to TRUSTe to bring accountability to their privacy programs and we’re actively working with APEC community to expand the scope of privacy accountability . We’ve also engaged the EU community and discussed 3rd party accountability agents as an alternative approach.
So congrats to the founders of the OECD Privacy Principles!
March 11th, 2010
Earlier this week we announced an important new release of our privacy policy generator. This is a tool primarily aimed at small and medium-sized businesses to help them quickly and easily craft a professional privacy policy. The generator uses a simple drag and drop interface and features privacy icons to help clarify practices for users. Check out a screenshot from the generator below:
Click on the image to enlarge it
Our generator creates privacy policies free of confusing legal language and include privacy icons used in the generator to identify important sections of the policy. If you want to see an example, check out the privacy policy that we created for webmarketingtherapy.com. That’s what we call a consumer friendly privacy policy!
February 25th, 2010
Click image above to see RSVP page
Next week is the eTail West conference in Palm Desert, California, where over the course of four days top online retail executives will share their knowledge and expertise and attendees can preview the latest e-commerce technology solutions. TRUSTe will be there and we’re also co-hosting (with Amadesa and BlueHornet) an after-party on Tuesday night at Costa’s Night Club, with an open bar and live DJ. This event is by invitation only so please RSVP in advance to gain entrance, which you can do by visiting the following address: http://www.amadesa.com/personaloasisparty
February 16th, 2010
By Fran Maier
President and Executive Chair
TRUSTe
Is too much of a Buzz a good thing? With the initial release of Google Buzz, from a privacy perspective we might have to ask: “what was Google thinking?”
Last month Google posted, in time for the FTC Privacy Roundtable in Berkeley, the company’s Privacy Principles. Moreover, Nicole Wong, Google’s Deputy General Counsel told the Roundtable audience:
“I’ll just be really clear: We compete on privacy. We do that in terms of trying to develop the best possible products that are privacy sensitive. We do that because we have an entire team of engineers specifically dedicated to privacy, and a cross-functional group that meets every week that involves everyone from engineers to policy people to legal people to talk about the biggest issues in privacy. We absolutely compete in this space.”
So let’s see how Google’s Privacy Principles reflect on Google Buzz: (more…)
February 15th, 2010
It provides consumers with notice and choice about the advertising practices of websites they visit. Register to see a demo by clicking here.
February 11th, 2010
by Maureen Cooney
Chief Privacy Officer & VP Public Policy
TRUSTe
Boston, MA – Privacy by Design or Privacy By Disaster? That was one of many questions that leaders in the telecom and advertising industries, academia, government, civil society, and a handful of privacy practitioners decided to tackle this past week at the 1st Privacy 2.0 International Summit, a Telco 2.0 Executive Brainstorm hosted in collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Nokia Siemens Networks. Fred Carter from the Ontario Information Commissioner’s Office and Professor Kai Rannenberg of Goethe University in Frankfurt set up the dichotomy well and their results. TRUSTe was proud to be among the organizations invited to add to this important dialogue. (more…)
February 9th, 2010
By Fran Maier
President and Executive Chair
TRUSTe
Photo Credit
Last week I attended the 2nd Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Privacy Roundtable, held in Berkeley, California. The roundtable featured an impressive group of privacy players from both the public and private sector, including FTC regulators, CPOs of major U.S. companies, and leaders of prominent national privacy groups. A great number of featured speakers were TRUSTe clients and TRUSTe co-hosted a reception at Hotel Durant following the Roundtable. Roundtable speakers addressed issues ranging from privacy technology and policy, social networking, and cloud and mobile computing. Here are my takeaways:
1. Expect more FTC privacy enforcement actions in 2010:
The FTC’s Director of Consumer Protection, David Vladeck, made this clear in his opening statement, saying “I don’t want people to think that these roundtables represent the sum total of our work … we hope to announce law enforcement actions this year in the realm of behavioral advertising.”
2. Privacy still matters:
Speakers noted that the most-emailed New York Times article the other week was about Facebook privacy settings (see “The 3 Facebook Settings Every User Should Check Now”) and that for the Firefox browser an ad-blocking feature remains the most popular browser ad-on. Facebook’s Director of Public Policy, Tim Sparapani, also noted that when the social networking site rolled out new privacy settings this past December 35 percent of its users tailored their Facebook privacy settings to accommodate their preferences. (more…)
February 1st, 2010
by Maureen Cooney
Chief Privacy Officer & VP Public Policy
TRUSTe
Is your data “under control?” Whose responsibility is it for protecting consumer privacy? How can consumers have confidence that the websites they visit collect and use their data responsibly and in a privacy attentive way? Dialogues on these questions have been taking place today – Data Privacy Day 2010 – and throughout this week as government, consumer advocates, businesses and the press seek to raise awareness among consumers about the value of their personal and behavioral information online.
At TRUSTe, these are questions we address with companies and consumers everyday. Privacy practices at companies and within industries sometimes do not keep up with the pace of online innovations. TRUSTe assists companies to step up to best practices to retain consumer trust. One example much in the news includes privacy concerns about non-transparent data collections and profiling about consumers by third parties for the purpose of serving tailored advertising, including in some cases linking that data with personally identifiable information. Yesterday, I had the opportunity to speak at the 2010 Internet Data Privacy Colloquium in Washington, DC, on a panel addressing Commercial Data Bases and The Transparent Consumer, and the need to make these practices on websites more transparent to consumers and to give them options to control such collection, sharing and use. (more…)
January 28th, 2010
by Joanne Furtsch
Policy & Product Architect
TRUSTe
Yesterday I attended Mozilla’s Privacy Workshop in the Bay Area, CA. The Privacy Workshop at Mozilla was an interactive, thought provoking discussion on key privacy issues for consumers. Mozilla, as part of its Privacy Icons project, invited privacy experts in attendance to brainstorm on these issues. Mozilla, like TRUSTe, is working on an initiative on how to represent privacy in an iconic format that will provide consumers with meaningful, relevant, and actionable information about the privacy practices of a Web site. Mozilla offered up the following taxonomy for debate: (more…)
January 28th, 2010
Today we launched a pilot program with AT&T and Comcast to test a mechanism for providing consumers with notice about advertisements on Web pages they visit and the ability to opt-out of ads delivered according to their past web browsing activity. The Behavioral Advertising Notice and Choice Program helps online ad publishers (websites) comply with FTC behavioral advertising guidelines by placing an ad icon on their Web pages that when clicked opens a TRUSTe pop-up widget providing consumers with notice and choice about the ads they see on the site. Below you can see a screen shot of this widget in action:
You can read the full press release here.
January 26th, 2010
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