Privacy Rules: Business vs. Consumers: Page 2

Federal anti-spam legislation, known as the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, was supposed to solve the spam problem. Unfortunately, by defining the problem narrowly, by denying consumers any legal recourse against spammers, and by imposing only trivial burdens on email marketers, Congress gave businesses lobbyists everything they wanted.

In doing

so, they ensured that the spam problem would continue to grow virtually unchecked, as it indeed has ever since the law’s passage.

As businesses gear-up to promote the lowest level of privacy protections that they can advocate with a straight face, I hope that some companies will stop and look at the myriad of privacy laws that exist around the world and realize that many of them are already standardized at a level of protection that is higher than American’s are used to.

Many businesses that have been operating in Europe for the better part of the last decade are already quite familiar with the fundamentally different approach to privacy taken by member countries of the European Union.

Building on privacy guidelines issued in 1980 by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, privacy laws in Europe and elsewhere around the globe have largely standardized on some basic principles (You can view them here), including:

• Limits on the collection of personal data without the knowledge and consent of the data subject;

• Limiting the collection of personal data to only when it’s relevant to the transaction and only for use in relation to that transaction;

• Openness about what data is stored and the ability for the data subject to correct or delete data;

• Data security;

• The ability to hold businesses accountable for compliance with these principles.

Contrary to the horror stories that business lobbyists have peddled for nearly a decade, Europe is still in business.

The ability to conduct effective, profitable, and data-intensive business within Europe has not been stifled. In fact, by establishing such clear guidelines many European consumers are even more willing to try new high-tech products and services, secure in the knowledge that vendors will be required to give them strong privacy protections.

Contrast that with a blog posting I saw just recently, in which a college student shied away from joining a popular interactive online community, saying: “I was about to try World of Warcraft free for 10 days, but I got freaked out at the amount of information they wanted out of me as well as their mile long [terms of service] agreement [so I] closed the window.”

American businesses need to remember that their goal should be to encourage regulations that will create the most advantageous business environment possible. A knee-jerk response to push for the lowest common denominator may not be in the long-term best interests of either these companies or their customers.

At this time when Congress is beginning to look seriously at changes to laws on privacy, inspiring confidence among consumers should be the foremost goal, instead of trying to see how much you can get away with.

American businesses need to remember that, sometimes, the worst thing that can happen to you is for your wishes to come true.