THE ATLANTIC
Jathan Sadowski | February 26, 2013

Our privacy is now at risk in unprecedented ways, but, sadly, the legal system is lagging behind the pace of innovation. Indeed, the last major privacy law, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, was passed in 1986! While an update to the law — spurred on by the General Petraeus scandal — is in the works, it only aims to add some more protection to electronic communication like emails. This still does not shield our privacy from other, possibly nefarious, ways that our data can be collected and put to use. Some legislators would much rather not have legal restrictions that could, as Rep. Marsha Blackburn stated in an op-ed, “threaten the lifeblood of the Internet: data.” Consider Rep. Blackburn’s remarks during an April 2010 Congressional hearing: “[A]nd what happens when you follow the European privacy model and take information out of the information economy? … Revenues fall, innovation stalls and you lose out to innovators who choose to work elsewhere.”

Even though the practices of many companies such as Facebook are legal, there is something disconcerting about them. Privacy should have a deeper purpose than the one ascribed to it by those who treat it as a currency to be traded for innovation, which in many circumstances seems to actually mean corporate interests. To protect our privacy, we need a better understanding of its purpose and why it is valuable.

Read on…

NEW YORK TIMES
Steven Greenhouse | January 21, 2013

As Facebook and Twitter become as central to workplace conversation as the company cafeteria, federal regulators are ordering employers to scale back policies that limit what workers can say online.

Employers often seek to discourage comments that paint them in a negative light. Don’t discuss company matters publicly, a typical social media policy will say, and don’t disparage managers, co-workers or the company itself. Violations can be a firing offense.

But in a series of recent rulings and advisories, labor regulators have declared many such blanket restrictions illegal.

Read on…

POLITICO
Rep. Darrell Issa & Rep. Anna Eshoo | September 17, 2012

The Internet is essential to life in the 21st century. The way we do business, communicate and live our lives now largely depends on being able to get online. Ensuring the freedom to access and use the Internet has become a bipartisan priority.

For the first time, both the Republican and Democratic parties included a discussion of Internet freedom in their official platforms.

“The Internet,” says the GOP platform, “has unleashed innovation, enabled growth, and inspired freedom more rapidly and extensively than any other technological advance in human history. Its independence is its power.”

The Democratic platform states: “President [Barack] Obama is strongly committed to protecting an open Internet that fosters investment, innovation, creativity, consumer choice and free speech, unfettered by censorship or undue violations or privacy.”

These party platform documents are not without their differences. Open, inclusive and robust debate is a good thing. But when it comes to Internet freedom, there is far more that unites us than separates us.

That is the reason we have both signed the Declaration of Internet Freedom — a landmark document drafted by Internet advocates of all political persuasions who have come together in support of five principles that transcend partisan politics.

The declaration reads:

We stand for a free and open Internet.

We support transparent and participatory processes for making Internet policy and the establishment of five basic principles:

• Expression: Don’t censor the Internet.

• Access: Promote universal access to fast and affordable networks.

• Openness: Keep the Internet an open network in which everyone is free to connect, communicate, write, read, watch, speak, listen, learn, create and innovate.

• Innovation: Protect the freedom to innovate and create without permission. Don’t block new technologies, and don’t punish innovators for their users’ actions.

• Privacy: Protect privacy and defend everyone’s ability to control how their data and devices are used.

More than 50,000 people and some 2,000 organizations — representing millions of people around the world — have already signed this declaration. It has been translated into more than 70 languages, so that as many people as possible can read the text and participate in the debate.

The Internet may well prove to be our most fundamental technological achievement. Because of it, people around the world have instant access to vital information, can hold their governments accountable and create better lives for themselves and their families.

Democrats and Republicans, despite continuing political debate and differences, can join together to protect an open Internet that strengthens our economy and our democracy.

Will you join us in supporting the Declaration of Internet Freedom?

Visit www.internetdeclaration.org to view it.

NEW YORK TIMES
Jeffrey Rosen | September 7, 2012

Privacy is a topic that tends to inspire discursive essays rather than philosophical treatises. In “A Bachelor’s Complaint,” in 1823, Charles Lamb deplored the exhibitionism of married couples who “perk up” their public displays of affection when in the company of single friends. In 1890, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis lamented that American law, which protects privacy indirectly through laws safeguarding property, contains no remedies for the mental suffering that results from an offense against honor. Rather than attempting a comprehensive treatment of the subject, the privacy essayist identifies a distinctive value that privacy protects (ranging from dignity and autonomy to intimacy and friendship) and defends its value by using concrete examples and anecdotes from daily life.

The latest contribution to this useful genre is Garret Keizer’s “Privacy.” Keizer is a contributing editor at Harper’s, where part of his short book began as an essay, and his particular contribution is to concentrate on the “economic subtext” of the destruction of privacy. Read on…

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