FTC Active on Children’s Privacy and Comprehensive Online Tracking

Amidst broad expectations of a looming vote to finalize proposed revisions to COPPA. The basic conclusion of the Report is the lack of significant progress in addressing privacy concerns for children, which coincided with the Commission’s announcement that it has opened investigations into whether some of the apps had violated the law. Together, the pending COPPA Rule revision, the new Report and formal launch of investigations should serve as a very clear warning that the FTC will aggressively police the children’s app market.

And last week, the FTC held its long-anticipated Workshop on “comprehensive data collection,” an event that went well beyond looking at privacy issues around behavioral advertising, stretching the focus to much more complex data uses, going as far as to explore deep packet inspection. As articulated by FTC Commissioner Bill in her opening keynote, the Workshop’s goal was largely for the FTC to explore whether the Internet “data collection ecosystem” is “just a continuum, or are there bright lines that differentiate some from others.”

Discussions throughout the day revealed broad agreement among academics, industry representatives and regulators that data presents significant opportunities for businesses and users, and that policies should be technology neutral and harm must be better defined. But there were also very significant disagreements and open questions about the need for new policies and the role of regulators. The FTC opened the door on this discussion when it released its comprehensive Privacy Report earlier this year. With this workshop, they demonstrated that the door is wide open.

Hill Continues to Consider Location Privacy and Talk “Data Brokers”

The Senate Judiciary Committee last week postponed voting on a bill require app providers to seek affirmative “opt-in” consent from consumers before using their location information. Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) is planning to resume consideration of the bill, the Location Privacy Protection Act of 2011 (S.1223), this Thursday with the hopes of amendments that could garner bipartisan support. In anticipation of the Committee action last week, SIIA released a call to lawmakers to give the ongoing voluntary multistakeholder process more time to address needed transparency in mobile privacy.

Meanwhile, on the House side, the bipartisan Privacy Caucus will hold a briefing on Thursday morning on “data brokers,” with expected participation from FTC Commissioner Julie Brill and a wide range of industry representatives.

Administration Patent Conference Highlights

The FTC and DOJ held a joint workshop yesterday on the impact of patent trolls on the economy, where FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz made it clear that he fully understands the damaging effect of PAE’s (aka patent trolls) and is concerned with their impact on competition and American innovation. The Chairman went so far as to say that we may be driving off a patent cliff that could stifle intellectual property innovation and competition. In response to the Workshop, SIIA issued a statement of support, expressing our concern about the “patent cliff” and applauding Chairman Leibowitz for making such a strong statement about the significance of the problem.

While there were no direct outcomes of the Workshop, SIIA and other key stakeholders can remain hopeful that coming out of the workshop, all parties–including the FTC, DOJ and Congress–will work together for sensible changes that allow America’s technology industry to thrive.

EU Announces Copyright Initiative. Endorses Digital Freedom Strategy

On December 5, the European Commission announced that it would begin an initiative to modernize European copyright for the digital economy. The initiative has two parallel processes. The first is a series of stakeholder meetings to begin in early 2013 which will focus on “six issues where rapid progress is needed: cross-border portability of content, user-generated content, data- and text-mining, private copy levies, access to audiovisual works and cultural heritage.” The second process focuses on the medium term and will result in a decision on whether to table legislative reforms in 2014. It will focus on four issues: “mitigating the effects of territoriality in the Internal Market; agreeing appropriate levels of harmonisation, limitations and exceptions to copyright in the digital age; how best to reduce the fragmentation of the EU copyright market; and how to improve the legitimacy of enforcement in the context of wider copyright reform.” Some informative reactions from different interested parties can be found here.

More detail on the proposed topics of the review can be found in this background document.

And today, the European Parliament endorsed by a large majority the first Digital Freedom Strategy in EU foreign policy, setting out concrete points of action to be incorporated in EU trade and development policies. The measure contains a large number of policy statements ranging from net neutrality to digital arms embargoes. It specifically endorses the flow of information across borders as a goal of EU trade policy, thereby potentially putting this issue on the table for EU-US trade negotiations. You can find the report here.

White House Shoots Key Message during Heart of Global Internet Conference

During the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) in Dubai that began last week, the United Arab Emirates, Russia and China announced their intention to introduce a proposal that would explicitly give the ITU authority over the Internet, a move that the US delegation, civil society and business groups oppose. An ITU spokesperson later announced that the proposal had been withdrawn. Similar proposals are possible before the WCIT conference ends Friday. Today the White House released a blog post urging that the “WCIT should be about updating a public telecommunications treaty to reflect today’s market-based realities — not a new venue to create regulations on the Internet, private networks, or the data flowing across them.”