FCC Privacy Concerns 'Hypothetical,' Downes Says
FCC-proposed privacy rules are based on a “fundamentally flawed premise” that ISPs rather than edge providers are “uniquely able to see and harvest users’ ‘very sensitive and very personal’ data,” said Larry Downes, project director of the Georgetown Center for…
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Business and Public Policy, in replies. “Thanks to a highly successful encryption campaign accelerated in large part by fears of government abuse of such information, broadband providers are now effectively blind to data traveling between users and the Internet.” Because the FCC has jurisdiction over ISPs, it ignores edge providers like Facebook or Netflix, he said. “They alone have the capacity to use that information not just for commercial purposes but for the kinds of nefarious uses the Commission worries may be the latent intent of access providers.” But Downes also said the “happy reality” is that FCC concerns “are almost entirely hypothetical.” The FTC, through “extensive and assertive oversight” of data practices has kept problems from developing, he said in comments posted Tuesday in docket 16-106.