Privacy International calls Internet giants to meet on privacy (updated)

11/06/2007

UPDATE AND AMENDMENT

Rather than a single summit, Privacy International is currently meeting on a one-to-one basis with companies to discuss more longstanding co-operative and collaborative arrangements. To date, we have received promising responses from AOL, BBC, ebay, Facebook, Google, hi5, Microsoft, Wikipedia, Xanga, Yahoo!.

However, of the companies listed above, only ebay, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Xanga have committed to working together in the future.

Surprisingly, despite repeated attempts to reach out, we have not received responses from a number of companies including: Amazon, Apple, Bebo, Friendster, Last.fm, LinkedIn, Livejournal, Myspace, Reunion.com, and YouTube.

BELOW IS ORIGINAL TEXT OF THIS NEWS ITEM

Following the recent publication of its consultative privacy rankings, PI has called on the major Internet companies to meet with the organization in July in San Francisco. The meeting has been called to clarify a number of data handling practices and is seen by PI as the first step to achieving an accord that will provide customers with consistent and strengthened privacy protections, and to give companies a greater understanding of the key challenges.

We believe that in the coming months privacy will become a key differentiator on the Internet. It is clear that customers expect strong and consistent privacy protection. We also believe that most companies operating Internet destinations also want to embrace meaningful privacy protection.

Currently neither condition is possible. Part of the challenge in achieving better privacy stems from an absence of some reliable information on existing practices. Companies tend to devote most of their energy devising ways to develop new business practices through mining personal information without first agreeing on a sensible and trusted framework that will engender consumer confidence. Communication between companies tends also to take place at an economic level rather than at the level of creating protections for customers. We hope the meeting will result in the beginnings of an "accord" that will create greater consumer confidence based on an improved privacy baseline across the Internet.

A timely and important opportunity now exists to embrace privacy and to turn the Internet into a safer and more trusted environment.

The goal of this first meeting will be to discuss existing practices in an attempt to discover exactly how customer data is being used. The meeting will provide companies with an opportunity to challenge the interim conclusions within our consultative report, and to provide further detailed information for the full report to be published in September. We believe it is important to understand the full extent of data practices before moving on to agreement on future action. That is precisely why Privacy International has published a consultation report in advance of a full report.

We will then discuss common elements that can be universally improved across the Internet.

We reiterate our previous position that the portrayal of Google as the sole privacy offender is incorrect and misguided. Such an interpretation misses our key finding that the Internet is awash with companies that demonstrate poor privacy practice. Though Google is particularly poor in many areas of its approach to privacy, it places more favourably in others (e.g. leadership by not handing over piles of data to the U.S. Government). But Google is just one of the many. The extensive commentary on our consultation report demonstrates that perception of privacy on the Internet is polarised. The question that remains is how do we constructively and cooperatively move forward to fix the damage that is being wrought.

Privacy International believes that an Accord is long overdue and we will work with companies to support a framework that supports confidence-building.

The meeting has been called for the week of 23rd July in San Francisco. Privacy International will reach out to all major Internet organizations with invitations to the event. These will be sent by Tuesday 12th July, 12.00 EST. We will then publish the full list of invited organizations together with a status report on their responses to the invitation.

Related:
A Race to the Bottom - Privacy Ranking of Internet Service Companies
PI Meets with Internet Companies