MultiStakeholder Privacy Principles — The World Privacy Forum has led an effort to craft a set of principles with the nation’s leading civil liberties, privacy, and consumer groups. Today, the groups are releasing a set of baseline Multi-Stakeholder Principles in response to the U.S. Department of Commerce’s plan for a multi-stakeholder process on privacy. (The U.S. Department of Commerce is undertaking a representative process for bringing together members of industry and civil society to form new privacy rules.) These leading groups believe that for the multi-stakeholder process to succeed, it must be representative of all stakeholders and must operate under procedures that are fair, transparent, and credible.

WPF filed two sets of comments with the US Department of Commerce regarding the MultiStakeholder Process and the privacy topics to be taken up. The first set of comments were WPF’s formal filing of the joint Civil Society MultiStakeholder Principles on behalf of WPF and the American Civil Liberties Union, Center for Digital Democracy, Consumer Action, Consumer Federation of America, Consumers’ Union, Consumer Watchdog, Electronic Frontier Foundation, National Consumers’ League, Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, and US PIRG. The second set of comments were WPF’s own comments to the Department. WPF urged the Department to employ a fair process, choose focused topics, and to apply the full range of the Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights to each topic.

Online privacy | Apple privacy — Stanford University has released a study documenting how Google and other companies overrode Safari users’ browser privacy settings. The WPF encourages Apple users to download the Firefox browser and use Firefox, if at all possible, instead of Safari. Firefox did not have the same problem, and it allows for additional privacy add-ons, such as AdBlock Plus which are helpful privacy-enhancing tools.

Search engine privacy — WPF has updated its search engine privacy tips page to include more tips on how to segregate online activities. This has always been important, and it has become more important in light of Google’s announcement that it will be sharing data across its business units.

Facial recognition | Digital signage — The World Privacy Forum filed extensive comments to the FTC today following up on Pam Dixon’s testimony at a December 2011 FTC facial recognition privacy workshop. The WPF comments noted that “A walk-out opt-out is not a viable way of managing consumer consent in the area of facial recognition or detection technologies.” The comments discussed the importance of recognizing the Face Print as a unique biometric, and also discussed the need for finding ways of consumer consent that are reasonable. Given the ubiquity of cameras in some retail and public spaces, just walking away will become less and less of an option for consumers going forward, the comments argued. The comments also included the WPF’s ground breaking report, The One-Way Mirror Society, and the joint Consumer Privacy Principles for Digital Signage.These principles were signed by the nation’s leading privacy and consumer groups.