Advocates push back on exemption in federal privacy rules

Consumer advocates said Wednesday that placing an exemption in looming federal privacy rules for broadband providers that covers data divorced from an individual customer would be ill-advised and illegal.

The Federal Communications Commission is in the process of crafting rules that, under a proposal from Chairman Tom Wheeler, would make it harder for internet providers to use their customers’ data for most purposes. Privacy and consumer groups said in a Wednesday letter to Wheeler that the commission shouldn’t make an exception for data that has been stripped of information that could identify the customer to whom it belongs.

{mosads}“We urge the Commission to resist some parties’ request for the creation of a special carve-out for ‘de-identified’ customer information,” the groups said. “There is no room in the statute to accommodate that request.”

“Even if there were, it would be harmful to consumers to allow ISPs to make an end-run around privacy rules simply by removing certain identifiers from data, while leaving vast swaths of customer details largely intact,” they added.

The groups argued that it would be easy to re-connect the data with a user.

“It is often trivial to re-identify data that has supposedly been de-identified,” they said in the latest salvo in the battle over the rules.

Their letter was signed by 39 groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Free Press.

The groups also said they worried about only applying a key part of the rules to only “sensitive” information, said that the commission should take steps to make sure that privacy complaints aren’t forced into arbitration and reiterated their belief that “pay-for-privacy” schemes are problematic.

Industry groups have said that they believe it is unfair that the commission would impose strict privacy rules on their operations while companies like Facebook and Google, which also mine their users’ data for information, remain governed by a less-severe standard at the Federal Trade Commission.

But Wheeler has argued that the internet service providers have a singular high-level view of their customers’ behavior.

“I go to WebMD, and WebMD collects information on me,” he said earlier this year before Congress. “I go to Weather.com, and Weather.com collects information on me,” he said. “I go to Facebook, and Facebook collects information on me. But only one entity collects all of that information, that I’m going to all of those different sites, and can turn around and monetize it.”