[sudo-discuss] [law thread] privacy, mobile apps, innovation

[Anon195714]

This is _really_ interesting to me and I want to hear more, find out
more, and see if there are places to plug in and make a difference.  I
got back from work an hour ago and my brain is mushed & I still have
more work to do tonight, so I'll mark this for future reference, but
please do keep us posted.

-G.
"Big Brother is iWatching you!"


=====



On 13-04-10-Wed 5:48 PM, Romy Ilano wrote:
> I'm starting a law-related thread, there are a lot of smart law people
> here.
>
> I'm a mobile app developer + a lot of people I know were at this
> workshop today.
>
>
> http://techpresident.com/news/23721/california-attorney-general-kamala-harris-mobile-innovation-i-dont-want-shut-it-down
>
>
>   California Attorney General Kamala Harris Talks Mobile Innovation,
>   Privacy, and the Law
>
> BY SARAH LAI STIRLAND <http://techpresident.com/blog/76848> |
> Wednesday, April 10 2013
>
> California Attorney General Kamala Harris on Wednesday urged mobile
> software developers to explain to users how their products work as
> clearly as possible so that there are no nasty surprises -- both on
> the part of the end users, and the developers who may hear from her
> office for privacy violations.
>
> "Let's not stop the innovation. I don't want to shut it down," she
> told a roomful of developers and businesspeople at the startup
> co-working office space Runway Workspace in the South of Market area
> of San Francisco. "But what we do have to do is to give the user
> information, and let the user, not anyone else, make the choice about
> the tradeoff."
>
> Harris spoke at an event organized by her own office, the University
> of California Hastings (her alma mater) and the Association for
> Competitive Technology, an association in Washington, D.C. that
> represents individual software developers who often can't afford to
> hire their own in-house privacy counsel. Her remarks come as the Obama
> administration itself is struggling to work with all kinds of
> stakeholders on how to best protect consumers in a world where their
> devices are always on, and using the attributes of personal
> information and location to build their businesses.
>
> Harris' office published a 20 page-plus booklet of checklists and
> recommendations for app developers
> <http://oag.ca.gov/sites/all/files/pdfs/privacy/privacy_on_the_go.pdf>to
> be mindful of when creating their products this January.
> The Electronic Frontier Foundation
> <https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/01/california-attorney-general-releases-mobile-privacy-recommendations>,
> a digital rights group, praised the recommendations, but several
> advertising associations, including the American Association of
> Advertising agencies, called them "unworkable."
>
> Her office established a special privacy enforcement and protection
> unit last July, staffed with some high-powered lawyers, such as Travis
> LeBlanc, formerly a lawyer at the white-shoe law firms of Williams &
> Connelly in Washington, D.C., and Keker & Van Nest in San Francisco.
>
> How state attorneys general approach privacy in the digital world is
> of great interest to practitioners in political technology. San
> Francisco-based Organizer, for example, enables campaigns to track
> their field canvassers with GPSes on their mobile phones as they knock
> on doors and updates information in its voter database in real-time as
> volunteers collect new data. As users do more and more from their
> phones, mobile advertising has gained increasing attention from
> political campaigns. And one of the biggest innovations to come from
> the Obama campaign in 2012 was software that avoided potential Federal
> Election Commission roadblocks against collecting mobile donations by
> allowing donors to authorize, by text message or otherwise, a gift
> from their credit card account already on file.
>
> The terms of service governing these and many other applications are
> breaking new legal ground, and consumers are just beginning to
> understand how their data is shared, used, bought and sold --- in
> politics and otherwise.
>
> Harris is an apt character to follow in the privacy debate. She may be
> the only attorney general in the country to have made privacy policies
> a campaign issue when, in 2010, she accused her then-Democratic rival
> Chris Kelly, Facebook's former chief privacy officer, of giving
> Facebook's users' information away, a charge that Kelly's campaign denied.
>
> "Some people might not mind giving up their contact list to get that
> mobile app, because they only have four people in it, and they don't
> like them anyway," Harris joked at the event. "Me, not so much. I
> don't want to give up my contact list. Let the user figure out what
> the benefit is before they give it up."
>
> Harris urged developers to tell their users as much as possible about
> how they use their information, and to give them 'tools' to let them
> make their choices. The Association for Competitive Technology is
> working on such tools, like a privacy dashboard
> <http://www.bitly.com/pridash> that would tell app users, through
> icons, what information is being collected.
>
> "I am a career prosecutor. I know the great power that we have,"
> Harris told the audience. "I learned at a very young age in my career
> that with a swipe of my pen, I could charge someone with a
> misdemeanor, the lowest level of crime possible, and by virtue of
> doing that, that person would have to pick out of their pockets to
> hire a lawyer. They may be arrested, they may spend a couple of hours
> or days in jail, they'll be embarrassed in the context of their family
> and community, probably have to miss time from work for court
> appearances -- all because I charged him with a crime. It's an
> incredible amount of power that we have, and we're well aware of that."
>
> Some developers at the meeting Wednesday morning said that they
> weren't aware of all of the legal requirements they had to fulfill
> when building their apps, and some even suggested that Google wouldn't
> have been possible as a company had all these rules on privacy been in
> place at its founding, a notion that LeBlanc contested during a later
> panel.
>
> Jerome Starch, a developer who attended a NASA hackathon in March and
> who is developing an app with information from NASA to get kids
> interested in science, stood up after Harris left, and said her words
> "terrified" him.
>
> Morgan Reed, ACT's executive director, re-assured him, saying that
> NASA uses Privo, a service that ensures app compliance with the
> Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. <http://www.provo.com/>
>
> Jonathan Nelson, another entrepreneur who spoke that morning, drew
> cheers when he said, "What I really want is privacy as a service for
> $5 a month."
>
>
>
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