Government vs Private Enterprise Consumer Privacy Protection: Pros and Cons

 Government vs Private Enterprise Consumer  Privacy Protection: Pros and Cons

This title is quite a mouthful, so let me attempt to explain:.

The latest Amazon kerfuffle has raised a more generalized question.

Last month’s column mostly discussed the issue of Internet privacy and may have left the impression that privacy is inherently a good thing as well as a citizen’s right. However, it raises a thorny issue: how to provide and enforce that right?  Can it be done with a cooperative effort by the service providers as self-watchdogs or should the government be the watchdog and provide the protection?

Like most thorny problems there are pros and cons to alternative solutions. An advantage to government regulation is that it is set up to be fair and impartial and we are protected under current interpretations of the Constitution and including its amendments known as The Bill of rights.  This can be a pro or con for Internet providers as well as service providers as they would have conflicting goals: on the one hand, most may really wish to provide privacy protection for their users but at the same time and, as anyone who has been watching the TV series “Billions” knows, corporations must make profits for their stockholders (and consequently themselves) and offtimes attempt to avoid the law in order to do so. 

Unlike the government, corporations are not elected by the people, so the government handling the issue is another plus for the government. On the other-other hand one can argue that the government has a history of being sluggish, costly and is prone to overreach making private enterprise the wiser choice. Clearly some sort of balance between the two should be worked out. Unfortunately, it is not a trivial task to balance what people say they want from a democracy to deciding how to provide that service  --- which is either through the auspices of the government or private enterprise. It isn’t even an exclusively one versus the other situation as it could also blend the rights and responsibilities of both. 

What about AI or Artificial Intelligence as a solution? It seems to be becoming a panacea for many other seemingly intractable problems. But using AI to help ensure privacy and security is also not as easy as it might seem.  AI is getting better and better at detecting and censoring hate speech but can it detect and block viruses and malware from taking over the computer’s built-in Operating system or OS?  

Oversimplifying, the OS is the boss of everything; it decides which components of the hardware will do what and when to do it. Perhaps “decide” is too much an anthropomorphic analog but the OS such as Microsoft or Chrome  (which to many are the Internet) are just programs written by programmers at a very detailed level called Machine Language that gets assembled into a format the hardware can “understand” and execute. 

Now suppose the programmer who wrote the program to steal or destroy data is smarter than the programmer(s) who wrote the OS.  It’s not going to be a happy scenario for users of the OS --- it becomes a game of cops and robbers where sometimes the cops win and sometimes the robbers get away with it. In other words, get over it or at least get used to it --- the struggle between good and evil has been a wrestling match for a long, long time.

There are three choices here: The government regulates, private industry regulates itself, or some hybrid model whereby regulation responsibility is shared. 

“One key lesson is that regulators should not be afraid of looking dumb and asking 'stupid questions'.  If something is unclear, or doesn't feel right, then you might well be close to learning something that the regulated entity doesn't want you to know. The classic example was the FBI's failure to follow up on their agents' reports that some trainee pilots had asked to be shown how to fly a plane, but not how to land it.  The result was 9/11.” (https://www.regulation.org.uk/reg_effectiveness-homepage.html”)

Once the dilemma of choosing the government, private enterprise or hybrid regulatory framework ,we would of course, have to name this agency and choose a suitable acronym for it because that’s how it works. For the sake of simplicity let us assume that we have chosen the Government-only Regulation option.

So first, what would we call this suggested “Internet Protection of Privacy and Security Agency'' ? The thought comes to mind that the simplest abbreviation is best: IPPSA. It even looks like it might be a pronounceable word (ippsuh) like many abbreviations for government agencies.  But wait, before we commit to an acronym,we must search through all of  the existing ones to make sure that we do not unwittingly reuse  one. Does there exist a list of all the agencies somewhere in the dusty corners of the Internet?  Of course. 

All one has to do is fire up their favorite Search Engine app to look for it.  When I enter the phrase “US GOVT agency acronyms” I got back a list of brief results from Google and chose the first one: https://govinfo.gov mainly because I trust websites that have the “.gov” suffix.   I got 8 pages of hits in a nice two-column table. The results range  from  ABMC standing for the AMERICAN BATTLE MONUMENTS COMMISSION to WHD for the Wage and Hour Division, whatever that means. ( I’m sure your search engine can find out.)  After a semi-intense scrutiny, we find that our proposed IPPSA choice would fit right in with no conflict). We could shorten it even further by dropping the “A” at the end to make  IPPS easier to pronounce. If you do venture to the website, it’s hard not to to get sucked in to browse the list finding edifying acronyms; for example, OJJDP stands for the  JUVENILE JUSTICE AND DELINQUENCY PREVENTION OFFICE  even though the “O” for Office seems to be misplaced.