Last week, during the 23rd
Annual Computers, Freedom & Privacy Conference, FTC Commissioner Julie
Brill proposed
a comprehensive initiative to address consumers’ loss of control over their personal
information, called “Reclaim Your Name.” According to Brill, “Reclaim Your Name
would give consumers the knowledge and the technological tools to reassert some
control over their personal data – to be the ones to decide how much to share,
with whom, and for what purpose – to reclaim their names.”
The campaign targets data brokers – companies that collect
personal information on consumers from a wide variety of sources, including the
Internet, and then resell that information to other businesses.
Ideally, the data broker industry would “develop a
user-friendly, one-stop online shop,” that would “empower the consumer to find
out how brokers are collecting and using data; give her access to information
that data brokers have amassed about her; allow her to opt-out if she learns a
data broker is selling her information for marketing purposes; and provide her
the opportunity to correct errors in information used for substantive decisions
– like credit, insurance, employment, and other benefits.” The FTC called for
such a system last year in its “Protecting Consumer
Privacy in an Era of Rapid Change” report; however, it has yet to come to
fruition.
While Brill supports legislation that would require data
brokers to provide “notice, access and correction rights to consumers scaled to
the sensitivity and use of the data at issue,” Reclaim Your Name is merely a
voluntary effort at this time. Data brokers that choose to participate in the
initiative “would agree to tailor their data handling and notice and choice
tools to the sensitivity of the information at issue,” but companies would not
be required to participate.
