HHR New Media, Entertainment and Technology Group

Last week, the FTC issued its final report on protecting consumer privacy.  The report, entitled “Protecting Consumer Privacy in an Era of Rapid Change: Recommendations For Businesses and Policymakers”, builds on a December 2010 staff report that was the subject of an earlier post.  While the final report maintains the FTC’s “bottom up” approach to privacy issues–including a final privacy “framework” to serve as a guiding policy for self-regulatory measures–rather than a “top down” approach of establishing federal privacy regulations, the FTC specifically recommended for the first time that Congress enact privacy legislation to augment self-regulatory efforts instituted by industry stakeholders.  Continue Reading »

A prominent developer of mobile applications, W3 Innovations, LLC, the parent company of Broken Thumb Apps (“W3”), has agreed to pay $50,000 to settle charges brought by the Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) in its first enforcement action involving mobile applications (“apps”), according to terms of the settlement announced last week. The FTC’s complaint, filed on August 12, 2011, alleged that W3, which develops and distributes mobile apps for Apple and Android devices, several of which are directed at children and are listed in the “Games-Kids” section of the iTunes App Store, violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) by illegally collecting personal information from children under the age of 13 without prior parental consent.  Continue Reading »

Last Tuesday, U.S. Senators John Kerry (D-Mass.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) introduced the Commercial Privacy Bill of Rights Act of 2011 which is intended to “establish a regulatory framework for the comprehensive protection of personal data for individuals under the aegis of the Federal Trade Commission.”  According to the bill, current laws at the state and federal level provide inadequate privacy protection for individuals and the Federal Government has “eschewed general commercial privacy laws in favor of industry self-regulation” which has largely been unenforceable and has provided insufficient privacy protections.  Continue Reading »

Recent activities out of Washington have again turned the spotlight on the complexity of protecting privacy in an era of targeted advertising and what role, if any, the federal government might take to implement regulations on the collection and use of data related to consumers’ digital habits.

This week the chair of the House Caucus on Privacy, Rep. Edward Markey of Massachusetts, criticized responses received by the Caucus from several large Web publishers admitting that keeping track of data collection on their sites is technically difficult, if not impossible.  Markey said that while the publishers detail their own privacy policies and opt-out procedures, these are often too complicated for the average consumer to follow.  He also pointed out that a single website may have dozens of firms collecting data through ads on the site and consumers would need to consult the policies of each of those firms to determine precisely what information was being collected and how it was being used.  (We recently wrote about this issue in a previous Digitalhhr post in connection with location-based advertising and Apple’s iPhone app policy.)  Continue Reading »

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• The Electronic Frontier Foundation released a “terms of service” tracker earlier this week. The tracker chronicles older and new terms of service agreements, side by side, and highlights changed provisions. The TOSBack.org site was created in part from an outgrowth of Facebook’s change in its service agreement in February that, under a broad interpretation, provided that Facebook with a license to its members’ uploaded content even after termination of membership. Following criticism in the media and by its members, Facebook backed down and provided for a termination of the license. But the episode revealed the difficulty end users have in evaluating how revised terms of service provisions can have real impact. The “terms of service” tracker currently tracks 44 sites, including Facebook, Google, WordPress, Data.gov, YouTube, GoDaddy, and eBay. Continue Reading »