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ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

NEWCOMB: Our guest is Rainey Reitman Activism Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Tell us what is happening.

REITMAN: Well, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is a non-profit civil liberties law firm and advocacy center. We’re based in the San Francisco Area and I’m the activism director, so I deal with helping individuals speak out on issues related to civil liberties on the internet and in digital technologies — so free speech, privacy, government surveillance things like that.

NEWCOMB: Interesting. So what are some of the top 1, 2, 3 projects you are working on with respect to the Foundation?

REITMAN: I work specifically on issues related to personal privacy and government surveillance. I think of particular interest right now is a bill we have in the State of California called ‘The Right To Know Act’. It’s a bill that got proposed recently that would update existing transparency law in California.

Right now in California you can go to a company and say, “Hey I’d like to know what personal information of mine you’ve collected and given to other companies for direct marketing purposes” like the companies that send you junk mail. The new proposal would update that law so that it would make sense for digital technologies. So you would be able to go to a company that you did business with online and say, “I want to know what companies you’ve given my information to” and that could be, for example, if you use a Facebook App and they collect data on you and then send it to a whole bunch of big marketing companies and online advertisers and data brokers and that gets fed into other companies that trade in this personal data. Right now, consumers don’t really have a very good idea about what companies are sucking up their data and who they’re passing it on to.

NEWCOMB: It kind of sounds frightening. I mean, how widespread is this practice if we’re just out to have fun on the internet and we’re on Facebook and try to catch up with some old friends and look at a photograph. What are they sending out there with respect to who we are and what we’re about? What kind of information?

REITMAN: Well that’s a really good question. But, unfortunately, we only have an inkling of what is going on right now and that is because there aren’t any real transparency laws. We know that there are really big companies out there called data brokers who have built an entire business model around a practice of receiving and collecting and buying and sharing and selling access to data. There’s been a lot of questions about where they are getting all of this information.

In fact, there have been Congressional inquiries into this and the Federal Trade Commission is currently investigating the practice and in general, these companies have pushed back and said we can give very general facts about where we are getting our information but we’re not going to answer specific questions because it’s a trade secret.

For the every day internet user, the every day person going about their business who doesn’t realize that when I sign up for this service or when I visit this site they are creating a profile on me and sending my data to other sites, this measure, The Right To Know Act in California would be a really powerful transparency measure. It would kind of do what we expect privacy policies to do but they don’t.

We expect privacy policies to tell us what’s happening with my personal information if I use this site. But, privacy policies are vague and filled with legalese. If this Act is passed, and you will see a lot of industry push back on this, we will actually have the ability to go to a company and say, tell me what personal information you have on me and what companies have you sold it to?

NEWCOMB: It almost sounds like you can make a Constitutional argument for the right to privacy. You can go to the companies and what is being said with The Right To Know Act but how about legislation that says you can’t do that period. I mean, don’t we have a right to say that, ‘No I don’t want any of that information shared’?

REITMAN: That’s an interesting question. I think that there are a lot of people who want to see sort of broader privacy legislation in place. We see that for example in the European Union where they have much stronger privacy legislation in place and they’re, in fact, considering a data privacy regulation that would update it with even stronger regulation. In the United States we have much more sector specific regulations. So, for example, we have medical privacy laws and we have privacy laws around employment background checks and we don’t really have anything that would be just a general internet privacy law other than the law we have in California which says you have to post a privacy policy.

NEWCOMB: But even with respect to the medical side to that (and I’m a physician), if you are trying to get an insurance plan there are these disclaimers at the end that you have to sign and say, ‘Hey you can share all of my medical information with other companies’ and i feel that’s just an effort for them to profile me medically and then if it’s shared with other insurance companies that is a way for them to deselect me out of the pool if they deem me high risk.

REITMAN: I think you are absolutely right. When we talk about medical privacy in particular I don’t even consider it a privacy law I consider it a disclosure law. Under HIPAA you actually don’t have huge rights to medical privacy you just have a right to know who they are giving your information to. In California we have a slightly stronger medical privacy law but unfortunately there is a major disconnect in terms of what is actually protected and what the law says.

Listen to the interview with Dr. Mike Newcomb and Rainey Reitman.

Dr. Newcomb’s Guest: Rainey Reitman, Activism Director for Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Take a look at an article by Rainey Reitman about the California’s ‘Right To Know Act’.

Visit the Electronic Frontier Foundation website.

SONALI KOLHATKAR IS ON MATERNITY LEAVE.