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U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden speaks at Urban Airship's headquarters this afternoon in Portland's Pearl District.

(The Oregonian)

U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, a leading critic of federal electronic surveillance practices, told a Portland startup this afternoon that "opt-in" should be the guiding principle for protecting online privacy from government snooping and intrusive marketers alike.

In a town hall meeting at Portland mobile software startup Urban Airship, the Oregon Democrat linked personal data that online marketers scour to the National Security Agency's data collection. In both cases, he said, people should have a right to choose which information to share.

"One of the things over the years that have begun to lay the foundation for it are opt-in principles. In other words, people very much in this country want to be able to say: I'm in charge of my information and my data," Wyden told a noontime audience of several dozen tech workers.

"If I'm willing to say somebody else can have it then so be it," he said. "But what I don't want to be part of is some kind of surveillance-industrial complex where everybody is just tracking me and personal information that I clearly have not volunteered to give up."

As a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Wyden has access to classified material on the NSA's activities and had been obliquely critical of them even before leaked details from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden went public last month.

This afternoon, Wyden said Americans shouldn't have had to get their information from a leaker. Federal authorities should have been upfront about their activities, he said, so that the public could evaluate their actions.

Private companies gather online information, too, of course. Google uses the text of Gmail, for example, to determine which ads to place alongside the text of a note. And Facebook has often been criticized for not being transparent about its privacy policies.

Urban Airship's software enables "push" notification in smartphone apps, notifying users of breaking news and special deals. The rapidly growing Portland startup also offers a location-based service that provides notification to app users when they're near a particular store, for example.

Chief executive Scott Kveton said this company takes pains to make sure users know what they're signing up for. He described Urban Airship's service as "triple opt-in" because users first must download an app, then enable notifications, and then approve location-specific notifications.

Opting in to Google or Facebook is often less explicit, but Kveton said he does not consider them to be objectionable because people who sign in receive free services in exchange for their information.

"It's the fact that the consumer gets something out of it that makes it acceptable," Kveton said.

-- Mike Rogoway; twitter: @rogoway; phone: 503-294-7699