Re: UK’s upper House urges privacy kitemark for online platforms | TechCrunch

Thanks for sharing, Dave.

Here is the brief summary from the Parliament report that discusses the privacy seal/kite-mark approach:

> 41.We support provisions within the General Data Protection Regulation to allow organisations to use privacy seals, or kite-marks, to give consumers confidence that they comply with data protection rules. (Paragraph 238)
> 
> 42.In order to encourage competition on privacy standards, not just compliance with the law, we recommend that the Government and the Information Commissioner’s Office work with the European Commission to develop a kite-mark or privacy seal that incorporates a graded scale or traffic light system, similar to that used in food labelling, which can be used on all websites and applications that collect and process the personal data of EU citizens. (Paragraph 239)
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201516/ldselect/ldeucom/129/12913.htm

And in more detail, the substantive section on privacy notices is here:
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201516/ldselect/ldeucom/129/12909.htm#_idTextAnchor113

We have frequently discussed in this and related fora the possibility of doing work on standardizing some improvement on privacy notices, perhaps through the model of privacy icons. W3C's previous work on P3P could be a useful data model, but the "seal"/"mark" work seems to be more focused on what the standards are for representing certain grades of practices. The more detailed text suggests that the UK ICO is already underway with a program of approving privacy seal schemes that are presented to them, but the recommendation suggests that there would be interest in collaboration, across sectors and across the EU, on developing a more effective seal/transparency system.

I remain interested in some privacy icons standardization work if others are. (I've tried to follow the OpenNotice folks, among others.) In the US, I see both ongoing academic research and commercial tools that work on either improving representation of notices through icons/grades or mechanisms for collecting that data.

—Nick


> On Apr 22, 2016, at 10:56 AM, David Singer <singer@mac.com> wrote:
> 
> "A report into the market power of large online platforms such as Google, Facebook, Amazon and Airbnb has concluded that more needs to be done to bolster consumer trust in tech giants’ handling of their data.
> 
> The review was carried out by the UK’s upper House of Parliament responding to a European Commission public consultation on “the regulatory environment for platforms, online intermediaries, data and cloud computing and the collaborative economy” aimed at furthering the latter’s digital single market strategy.
> 
> Among the report’s recommendations is a suggestion that a privacy standards kitemark be developed to badge best practice by web giants on data protection and transparency in order to further consumer trust and create an impetus for these businesses to compete on consumer rights and user privacy — rather than, as is the current suspicion, by attempting to outmaneuver each other via ever more comprehensive data-mining of users."
> 
> 
> more at
> 
> http://techcrunch.com/2016/04/20/uks-upper-house-urges-privacy-kitemark-for-online-platforms/
> 
> Dave Singer
> 
> singer@mac.com
> 
>