Colin Wood

[Commentary] Privacy isn’t dead, it’s just going through an identity crisis. As policymakers struggle to define a meaningful role for themselves in one of the most contentious areas of American politics, the advancement of digital technologies only makes the issue loom larger.

Each convenient new feature developed by Apple, Google or Facebook fuels a public conversation about the border between cutting-edge and creepy. Privacy is almost universally valued by humanity, but technology is advancing so quickly that people haven’t even had time to settle on a useful definition for the word, let alone a solution that everyone can live with.

One reason policymakers are struggling so much with emerging privacy issues is that the issues themselves are simply unprecedented. “It’s a huge challenge, because it becomes what lawyers call ‘a normative issue,’” Schwartz said. For practical purposes, Schwartz said, it is not wise to act as though privacy is dead, because the stakes are high. Vigilance is needed, he said, because the victim of ineffective privacy legislation is the public.

For the most part, policymakers don’t understand modern technology very well, Schwartz contends, and they’re not anticipating technological disruptions in society. There should be groups dedicated to imagining all the various scenarios that could arrive, he said, as is done in the intelligence community, because there will be disruptions and privacy is worth safeguarding.

The White House is leading efforts for online authentication technology -- a new form of identification that some have called a driver's license for the Internet.

But program leaders at the National Institute of Standards and Technology maintain that such a characterization is inaccurate, while privacy groups worry that the program’s scope could creep beyond the bounds of constitutionality if not carefully managed.

Today’s incarnation of the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC) endeavors to provide state residents with a common identity for acquiring services across state departments, piloting technology that could be used more broadly online. Michigan and Pennsylvania are now running federally-funded pilot programs to test early versions of the technology. An additional 10 organizations will be announced to receive pilot funding in August.

The program is also NIST’s effort to encourage the private sector to develop viable alternatives to a well-known but aging form of authentication: the password.

In July 2013, Kenya’s Ministry of Information, Communications and Technology along with the Communications Commission of Kenya launched the National Broadband Strategy, one piece of the nation’s ambitious Vision 2030 program.

But is the nation is ready to give its people the power of the Internet? Some fear broadband could become a tool of the powerful in Kenya, further dividing the classes. There also are fundamental infrastructure barriers to the success of a broadband rollout.

A 2011 World Bank survey found an average of 6.9 power outages in Kenya monthly, and the lack of reliable electricity was cited as a major constraint by more than 25 percent of Kenyan businesses.

The Florida Department of Children and Families (DCF) has adopted an online authentication tool the agency is using to ensure that the benefits it issues, like food assistance, are going to the right people.

Such incarnations of online authentication technology are sprouting up in state government agencies around the country, led by a White House vision of a new, central form of identification, what some are calling “a driver’s license for the Internet.”

The DCF reported that in 2013 it saved about $14.7 million through the use of an online authentication tool, with an initial investment of about $1 million and a total contract of just under $3 million. The DCF says the technology is saving so much money because it saves staff the time of verifying identities manually, and even better, there’s been a reduction in cases of identity fraud.

Not everyone thinks a driver’s license for the Internet is a great idea. Lee Tien, senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is skeptical whether the government’s main motivation with such a program would even be fraud prevention -- and not tracking. “We think it’s a terrible idea,” Tien said. “The main substantive issue is that much of what we do on the Internet is plain old speech: writing comments, posting on blogs or whatever. And one of the things about speech in the United States, especially under the First Amendment of the Constitution, is that you have a right to speak anonymously. […] Any mandatory type of ID online runs really directly counter to that.”