NSA Revelation Leads FTC To Propose "Reclaim Your Name" Initiative 82
First time accepted submitter clegrand writes "Julie Brill, a member of the Federal trade Commission, has proposed a voluntary big data industry initiative to allow consumers access to their personal records and the ability to correct them. She has coined it 'Reclaim Your Name.' While some big data companies such as Acxiom already allow such access, it is not an industry-wide practice. She sees this campaign as a natural extension of the Fair Credit Reporting Act and a logical partner for the ongoing effort of the Do Not Track mechanism currently under standardization review with the W3C."
Has been the law in France since 1978 (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.ambafrance-uk.org/Protection-of-freedoms-in-France
I don't see how. (Score:1, Informative)
While some big data companies such as Acxiom already allow such access, ...
Really? How? None of the articles say so..
All that's mentioned is this:
Acxiom, announced that it plans to open its dossiers so that consumers can see the information the company holds about them.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I have plans to call you in the morning and I have plans to put the check in the mail.
Re:Isn't this what the free market advocates claim (Score:3, Informative)
. After all, it's in many businesses interests to have accurate information
agreed.
and in individual consumer's interests to correct their own info.
Maybe, maybe not. Depends on their goals. Being obscured would suit some (many?) people just fine. It depends what value people assign to different things.
Libertarian theory says that the free market should have a lot of incentive to correct for bad info.
In a free market environment without corporations (government-granted exemptions from liability) and courts that respected property rights this might very well be true. Are you willing to allow that theory to be tested?
and the invisible hand crew will be saying that the market will correct eventually, and stop trying to hurry it along
I can't name a single libertarian who thinks that the government-corporate collusion that's going on to invade the privacy of US residents (and others) is likely to subside voluntarily. Ask Joseph Nacchio how well it works out if you put the interests of your customers over those of the State. And before you say, "but he did something wrong," realize that the entire purpose of PRISM and its ilk is to make a retrospectable list of crimes and prohibition violations that every American commits [amazon.com]. You too.
"The invisible hand" is Smith's market-god but Austrian price-information theory and its compliment, game theory, do provide a testable framework for information dispersal in free markets. That requires investigation of mid-to-late 20th century scholarship, though, not ideas that came two centuries before. And also markets that aren't artificially manipulated, for best effect, though the theory does work when such intrusions are counted as costs and losses.
Re:Isn't this what the free market advocates claim (Score:4, Informative)
What the hell are you talking about?
Libertarianism is a set of related political philosophies that uphold liberty as the highest political end. This includes emphasis on the primacy of individual liberty, political freedom, and voluntary association. It is the antonym to authoritarianism. Libertarians advocate a society with a greatly reduced state or no state at all
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism [wikipedia.org]
Libertarianism is about individual liberty, period. They believe that liberty is a human right, and no public need is great enough to give cause to remove it from the individual. It has absolutely nothing to do with this story. From the Libertarians point of view the FTC and even the credit burrows wouldn't exist, as both limit the liberty of the individual through regulation. Libertarians believe the only laws and regulations that should be created are ones that increase Liberty and prevent authoritarian control of the populace by Government or other citizens. i.e. Murder would be illegal because it obviously takes liberty away from the victim.
Please don't talk shit about political philosophies you clearly know absolutely nothing about.