Surprise, surprise, in a NYT mini-column, that Jim Harper, the director of information policy studies at the Cato Institute, says the Federal Trade Commission should not impose standardized opt-in and other rules to restrict big business from tracking us on its websites.
Marvin Ammori, a law professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln who advises the advocacy group Free Press, knows we really need this:
Self-regulation by online companies will continue to fail to protect privacy because these companies’ incentives, including lax security incentives, will result in privacy abuses. Direct regulation, not mere consumer consent, is necessary here, as it is in many other areas.
Self-regulation is like calling your own fouls in playground basketball, which isn't easy. ... Partly because of information asymmetries -- few consumers know the extent of tracking, retention, and subsequent sale of their data among companies or what their options are -- only one team calls the fouls, namely the ad industry team.
Couldn't have said it better myself.
What Cato, in its hypercapitalist libertarianism, refuses to acknowledge is that Big Business, like Big Government, has the power to violate privacy rights. Privacy rights is NOT like censorship, a matter controllable only by governments. Unless we are all to approach John Galt/Thomas Jefferson yeoman farmer levels of self-sufficiency, we have to purchase products and services. And, with the rise of the Internet, more and more often, those purchases MUST be made online.
