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Google Promotes Consumer Privacy
Doug Caverly
Staff Writer
2006-06-20
 Insider Reports RSS Feed
Google wants to protect your privacy. That's what the company is claiming, anyway, as it joins the Consumer Privacy Legislative Forum. This group would do away with the contradictory and sometimes incomplete mess of regulatory state laws, and enact a federal law in their place.
Nicole Wong, Associate General Counsel of Google, described the current state of affairs as "uneven at best" in an entry on the Google blog. "We have a growing patchwork quilt of state privacy laws, disparate industry-specific privacy laws (for example, different laws covering health-related data, financial data and children's online data), and a similarly-mixed bag of data security laws," she said.
Wong believes replacing this chaos with an overarching federal law would benefit the average person. "It would be good for our users, and would contribute to consumer trust on the Internet as a platform for communication, expression, e-commerce, and so forth. Americans care about their privacy, and so does Google."
She also attributed the Internet's current status as a "lawless land" to the lack of a unified regulatory system. "On an Internet beset with spyware, malware, phishing, identity-theft, and other privacy threats, enforcement of privacy protections has become an industry-wide challenge, and highlights the lack of a coherent regulatory structure."
In addition to Google, the Consumer Privacy Legislative Forum calls eBay, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems members, among others. The initiative, formed earlier this year, has quite a few powerful names backing it. As Wong said to conclude her blog entry: "A baseline U.S. federal consumer privacy law will help protect all of us online."
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About the Author:
Doug is a staff writer for SecurityProNews, InternetFinancialNews, SearchNewz, and WebProNews.
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