On Monday a Federal Trade Commission representative stated that current privacy laws fail to protect American consumers.
“We’ve put too much burden on the consumers to understand these policies,” said Kathryn Ratte, a senior attorney in the FTC’s consumer protection bureau.
This is most likely the result of a report that the agency plans to publish later this year. The report is expected to offer to Congress recommendations on new laws and may state that the FTC intends to expand its current authority around policing “deceptive” practices to address more Internet-related business practices.
“One of the issues we’ve identified is…to encourage companies to have better data hygiene,” Ratte said, through implementing policies such as “minimization and retention limits.”
In an area like cloud computing, which demonstrates “some of the limits of these traditional structures,” the current “notice and choice model in some very basic sense isn’t working,” she said.
