Over the past few weeks, online publishers have seen regulators’ focus on privacy in the social media context reach the boiling point.  Just this week, Politico reported that FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz confirmed in a letter to Sen. Mark Pryor that “FTC staff are carefully monitoring the privacy and security issues associated with social networking sites.”  Sen. Pryor, who chairs the Consumer Protection Subcommittee of the Senate’s Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, had expressed concern about privacy and security issues in the context of social media apps, and so we expect that social media privacy issues will play a key role in forthcoming online privacy legislation.  (We’ve posted Sen. Pryor’s letter to Leibowitz here.)

The announcement of the FTC’s focus on social networking comes on the heels of the FTC’s highly publicized settlement with Google over its Buzz product, which Erin Egan reported on earlier this year and was just approved by the court last week.  According to FTC blogger Lesley Fair, the agency alleged that consumers “weren’t adequately informed that certain information that had been private — including the people they chatted with or emailed most often — would be shared publicly by default.”

For other online publishers, the headline from the Google Buzz settlement is the requirement that Google implement a comprehensive “privacy by design” program across all of its products.  In a recent speech, FTC Consumer Protection Bureau Chief David Vladick pointed to this aspect of the Google settlement as a key shift in the agency’s expectations for social media providers generally.  In fact, the FTC has announced that it wants the privacy by design provisions of the Google settlement to “serve as a guide to industry.”  Privacy by design programs, it said, are a “good idea for all companies” and should be “flexible and scalable.”Continue Reading Regulators Take Aim at Social Networking Privacy