FTC Calls for “Privacy by Design”

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission today released a set of recommendations for businesses and Congress about the collection and use of consumers’ personal data.

This framework (PDF) has been in the works for years, and in the meantime there has been considerable progress on many of its final recommendations, both proactively by businesses themselves and through privacy investigations and settlements the FTC had with companies like Google and Facebook.

The FTC calls for “privacy by design,” simplified choices and greater transparency.

The report includes indications that the FTC is concerned about comprehensive tracking — the sort of stuff that companies like Google and Facebook are moving toward — though that’s one of the less-developed recommendations. FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz had previously called Google’s new unified privacy policy “a fairly binary and somewhat brutal choice” for consumers to make.

The FTC passed the report 3-1, with Commissioner J. Thomas Rosch dissenting for a few reasons, one of which was concern that the FTC is effectively mandating that Internet services will become “opt in” by design, even when that’s impractical or unnecessary. Again, that’s an important one for Google, Facebook and other Internet companies that seek to evolve along with the personal data they collect.

There are five main action items in the framework: