How Calls for Privacy May Upend Business for Facebook and Google<br />Congress might pass targeted legislation to restrict consumer data use in specific sectors, such as a Senate bill<br />that would require increased transparency in online political advertising, said Daniel J. Weitzner, director of the Internet Policy Research Initiative at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.<br />“This is the moment when Europeans turn to the state for protection<br />and answers, and are less likely than Americans to rely on the market to sort out imbalances.”<br />In May, the European Union is instituting a comprehensive new privacy law, called the General Data Protection Regulation.<br />“With the new European law, regulators for the first time have real enforcement tools,” said Jeffrey Chester,<br />the executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a nonprofit group in Washington.<br />Privacy advocates and even some United States regulators have long been concerned about the ability of online services to track consumers<br />and make inferences about their financial status, health concerns and other intimate details to show them behavior-based ads.<br />“If your personal information can help sway elections, which affects everyone’s life and societal well-being, maybe privacy does matter after all.”<br />But some trade group executives also warned that any attempt to curb the use of consumer<br />data would put the business model of the ad-supported internet at risk.<br />Although many people had a general understanding that free online services used their personal<br />details to customize the ads they saw, the latest controversy starkly exposed the machinery.
