Last week the European Commission in conjunction with the European Parliament held a summit on the Open Internet and Net Neutrality. More details of the summit can be found here. During the summit a number of different issues surfaced during the debate, but surprisingly privacy wasn’t one of them. Only several participants mentioned privacy in passing throughout the day.
Privacy is an important issue in today’s digital environment. From Google to Facebook and beyond privacy is such a big issue that the European Commission is including a ‘right to be forgotten’ in its next version of data protection principles. All of this is to say that privacy is at the forefront of technology policy and current news.
So why, then, did only the GSMA and Commissioner Kroes touch upon privacy in passing last Thursday? The obvious answer is that the organisers of the summit wanted to make sure that the entire day was focused on the openness of the Internet and whether or not the Internet should be regulated further as a result. How can this discussion be disassociated from privacy, however? Issues of privacy must be looked at when discussing overall technical and digital policy issues.
In response to the recently closed European Commission’s Consultation on the Open Internet and Net Neutrality in Europe, the Italian Institute for Privacy in conjunction with the European Privacy Association submitted a response in which it discussed the issues of privacy and net neutrality. The consultation document made the following points:
- ISPs can use traffic management to ensure privacy by potentially offering customers the option of selectively blocking requests from providers to collect data.
- With the advent of cloud computing, traffic management will limit access to personal information in ‘the cloud’ by adding an additional layer of security.
- Innovation will happen if ISPs can maintain their own networks how they see fit. Innovation will happen in a number of areas in the future including identity management and security.
These points are consistent with the point that Robindhra Mangtani of the GSMA made at the summit. He said that traffic management could help in a number of privacy areas including issues of privacy on lost mobile phones and laptops. Because of network and traffic management, a wireless carrier can remotely wipe sensitive data off of a customer’s lost machine.
The point of all of this is not just that privacy is important, but that the issue of net neutrality itself is so complex and means so many different things that one aspect of the debate, namely privacy, has hardly been touched upon. For now the European Commission is not going to impose any more regulation on the Internet and implement the 2009 Telecoms Directive only. This approach will allow for ISPs, mobile phone companies and consumers alike to manage their own secure data they way that they see fit.