WhiteHouse Updates its Privacy Policy

Martha Mendoza wrote a piece for the AP on the White House updating their out dated privacy policy.

The administration has been criticized from all sides after Edward Snowden exposed sweeping U.S. government surveillance programs. This policy aims to address at least some of those concerns.

From the article:

“Information you choose to share with the White House (directly and via third party sites) may be treated as public information,” the new policy says.

The Obama Administration also promises not to sell the data of online visitors. But it cannot make the same assurances for users who go to third-party White House sites on Facebook, Twitter or Google Plus.

The updates were needed because “Our old privacy policy was just that – old,” blogged Obama’s digital director Nathaniel Lubin.

Reviews from privacy experts – who have been watching the privacy-policy revisions closely – were mixed.

The biggest problem, said Jeramie Scott, national security counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C., is not what happens when users are on WhiteHouse.gov, but when they click onto the White House’s third-party social media sites that don’t abide by Obama’s own privacy rules and may sell personal data they glean from users.

“Interacting with the White House and its different sites is inherently political, and that type of thing shouldn’t be used for commercial gain,” Scott said.

Mark Jaycox, a legislative analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco, said the new policy underscores the administration’s ongoing interest in collecting data. “You see it across the board. You saw it in the campaign. You see it in the White House petitions. This is just one more step toward amassing more information,” he said.

Jaycox said the new policy is not explicit enough about what the White House does with information it gathers. “The onerous thing is we don’t know what they’re doing on the back end with all of this data,” he said.

But several privacy experts praised the new policy as more explicit and understandable.

“It’s a nice gesture by the White House,” said Federation of American Scientists secrecy expert Steven Aftergood in Washington. “I think the move reflects a heightened public awareness of privacy concerns, which is commendable.”

Consumer Watchdog Privacy Project director John Simpson said that in terms of pure disclosure, “this seems to be one of the better policies, a model perhaps for others.”

Read the whole article here