(Also see Hillary Clinton in 2008 Info Center Hub.)
According to the non-profit Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, the personal information of more than one in four Americans – 85 million people – has been compromised in just the last 15 months. Now some of these were massive breaches, like the theft of a single Veterans’ Administration laptop with the Social Security numbers and medical information of 26.5 million people...
And the personal stories can be heartbreaking. My office has heard from a minister harassed, wrongly, by credit agencies; a woman whose trusted tax adviser opened bank accounts and stole money in her name; a breast cancer patient whose mammography records were lost.
But at the same time, Americans are asking, privacy at what price, when we are confronted by criminals and terrorists who respect none of our core values. Terrorists don’t hesitate to use modern information technology – cell phones and the Internet. We need to be able to track them.
Meanwhile, new techniques like data mining have changed many of the things we thought we knew about surveillance. Americans are genuinely unsure about whether we can keep both our privacy and our security...
PROPOSING A PRIVACY BILL OF RIGHTS
I’m proposing that we have a new privacy Bill of Rights that secures the interests of consumers; provides stronger, better-enforced protection for medical privacy; and a new national security consensus setting out clear rules to allow the government to use new intelligence techniques within a rule of law framework and making sure that the public knows its rights and the government’s limits...
... we need a new set of consumer protections that boil down to three basic rights:
First, people have the right to know, and to correct, information which is being kept about them.
Second, people have the right to know what is happening to their personal information when they are cooperating with a business and to make decisions about how their information is used.
And third, in a democracy, people have the right and the obligation to hold their government and the private sector to the highest standards of care with the information they gather.
These rights should be basic to all of the commercial transactions we undertake and be part of a basic privacy bill of rights that has to be adhered to by every commercial information gatherer or marketer.
Now my Privacy Bill of Rights will be encapsulated in the PROTECT Act, which stands for... Privacy Rights and Oversight for Electronic and Commercial Transactions...
This legislation not only provides clear privacy rules, but it gives you clear protections for your most private information:
-- the right to sue when those rules have been violated
-- the right to protect your phone records
-- the right to freeze your credit when your identity has been stolen
-- the right to know what businesses are doing with your credit and credit reports, and
-- the right to expect the government to use the best privacy practices itself with your information...
Right now, the rules covering data processors are unclear, especially in cases where projects are outsourced. We need the FTC to issue a single, clear set of rules that provides comprehensive protection against unauthorized access or security breaches.
BUYING AND SELLING CELL PHONES RECORDS
Right now, it’s too easy to purchase, post or trade cell phone numbers and records. Canadian government officials, journalists, even General Wes Clark, have had their cell phone numbers and records sold to anyone willing to put up the money. And those are just the cases we know about, because reporters and bloggers were doing the buying to draw attention to the threat.
Buying and selling that kind of information is a gross invasion of personal privacy – but it’s not clear that it is a crime. And this is only going to get more challenging as consumers move to phone service based on broadband Internet technology, for which no regulations currently exist.
My legislation will try to get ahead of the curve of technology, making sure that consumers’ private cell phone numbers and call records remain private.
