Today, Senators John Kerry and John McCain introduced the much-anticipated “Commercial Privacy Bill of Rights Act of 2011,” a bill that would require businesses that collect, use, store or transfer consumer information to implement strong privacy protections in the development of their products and to provide consumers with meaningful choices about how their data is collected, used, and shared.
As its name suggests, the bill is structured around a set of consumer “rights,” including:
- The right to security and accountability, which the legislation would protect by authorizing the FTC to require strong data protections and the implementation of “privacy by design” by all companies;
- The right to notice and individual participation, which would be protected by authorizing the FTC to make rules requiring clear and concise notice of privacy practices (and material changes to those practices) and providing consumers with choices about the ways in which their data is collected, used, and shared; and
- The rights to data minimization, constraints on distribution, and data integrity, which the bill would protect by imposing limitations on the amount of information a company may collect, the period of time such information may be retained, and on the uses of information transfered by one company to another.
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