What is the Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights? Which rights does the bill strive to protect? How would you be able to control your own private information? Join Chris and Jonathan as they explore the ins and outs of the Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights.
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Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready. Are you didn't touch? With technology? With tech Stuff from how stuff works dot com. Hello, everyone, welcome to tech Stuff. My name is Chris Polette and I am an editor at how stuff works dot com. Sitting across from me as as usual as senior writer Jonathan Strickland. It was a pleasure to burn And that was a short quote. Yes, short and to the point. Today we're going to talk about the Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights. Yes. Um, A lot of people probably don't know that that we're even that there is even is such a thing or such a thing being proposed, I should say, um, but we have talked about privacy many times on the podcast. Um, something that a lot of people are willing to give up, at least in part um, thanks to all the cool stuff that you can get on the Internet if you're willing to give people your personal information. And really, in some cases it's not even that you get cool stuff, it's just that there's been an avenue created where you can share personal information, and that's what people have done. You know, It's it's it's kind of crazy. It's a sort of stuff where the thing the kind of information that you wouldn't think to share in, say, necessarily a letter, Which is interesting because the letter, there's there's some privacy guarantees to things that are that passed through the United States Postal Service that you do not get the same guarantee necessarily when you publish it online. And of course online allows for in many cases a much wider variety of people to get a chance to get their papers on that information. That that's true, and it's also a good point, I think to point out that, uh, the Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights is something that is being suggested here in the United States, and not every um, not every country in the world has the same guarantees on postal service privacy, and some some countries already have legislation in place that does address privacy concerns as far as the internet's concerned. So this is kind of a it's sort of codifying behaviors and best practices that a lot of people I think have assumed we're in place already. But in this case, it's saying, let's write this down, get in black and white, uh, potentially put it into law and then make it an enforceable list of guidelines so that companies that handle private information are doing so in a responsible manner and a transparent manner, as it turns out, right, right, Well, we've talked about many of the companies involved in this uh in this first round of privacy negotiations with the United States government. Um and we've we've also handled a lot of these issues before. We've talked about things like um uh cookies and other information that is recorded about you when you visit places on the internet or websites, I should say, um and and basically the idea of being that uh, you know, as we are moving farther into the twenty first century, it is becoming more commonplace for us to share stuff about us, and people are are tracking us in ways that um that we're sort of you know, impossible really without the the use of the internet. Yeah, and and a lot of people are unaware of that tracking, even though in many cases the terms for that sort of tracking are laid out in uh somewhere yeah. Right, there's like usually a spot somewhere on a website or service where you can learn how the information you give to that cider service is used and whether or not it's shared with other entities, and uh, there's there's almost always some sort of terms of service that spell this out, although very few of us take the time to either find or read that, even if it's presented right in front of us. I mean, I know, I've been guilty of scrolling all all the way down so I can check I have read this and I agree yes, when really it just means I have scrolled down and found the checkbox. Well it Uh, it's one of those things that a lot of us have done, especially when we've received an invitation to a hot new social network or something like that, where we've we've there's been some hype builds up at the beginning. Um, and then you get your and then you get your address and it says, you know, hey, Jonathan, please go ahead sign up for an account. You're in the beta, And you go on and you fill it out as fast as you can. You get the privacy agreement, You scroll down to the bottom, you click the agree, but and then the pop up comes up are you sure you agree? And click and you just scream, let me get to the print these yeah, yep, and they can uh, you know, you think about it, they can put the absolutely, they don't even have to bother to lie to you because they know that you know, you're gonna go ahead and click. Okay, they know they say, we're going to share this stuff about you. You're okay with that, right? All right? Then they the people aren't going to read it, and the one person of the people who do read it are gonna agree anyway because they don't want to be left out. Well, you might get there, you go, you always have like that one guy who's who's screaming out you don't want to do this, and and that one guy might be right. You know, it doesn't We're not saying that one guy is a crazy person standing out screaming out that we're all you know sheep, but that one guy may very well have a point. And the whole reason why this has come around is because there's more scrutiny now on companies, particularly big internet companies that have been collecting private information, and some of that scrutinious because we've had some pretty public uh security breaches like information, you know, personal information being breached by hackers and then distributed, so things like you know, personal information with addresses, maybe even credit card information that kind of stuff has shocked people. So that's this is partially in response to that, but it's also in response to trends like search engines keeping track of your search history and then using that information to market it to advertisers, so that these advertisers can target people who are who have have certain behaviors because they they'll say, oh, this person tends to search for these sort of topics. That means that they're probably interested in these sort of products or services. Therefore, if we serve up ads to that person that advertise those kind of products and services, they're more likely to go ahead and buy them. And so it's a whole idea of the more information you have about your target are the audience, the more effective you can be when you are advertising to them. Uh. We've also seen this used. There's been scrutiny from some fairly recent stories. Did you see the story about how target UH was able to identify Yes, okay, so there's a story. We'll we'll give some background here. Okay, it's it's it's a story that definitely has some controversy around it. All right, So, uh, target had created a very effective system to identify customers. UH, and and kind of get an idea of what that customers. So life status was based upon their shopping habits right right. Um, specifically, they were looking for people who were about to have a baby. Yes, And one of the reasons why this was the case you might say, well, you know, why not people who are getting ready by an h D t V. Well, as it turns out, the people who are about to have kids are um people uh tend to get in habits, and so they buy the same brands of laundry detergent and clothing and things like that for years and years and years. So what advertisers want to do is they want to find ways to get you to switch brands over to their thing. But as it turns out, this time when people are about to have kids is a prime time for people to switch because um, things are changing drastically in their life. They start considering it's not just someone who needs a crib and someone who needs a high chair, and someone who needs uh you know, uh diapers and things like that baby supplies. It's it's for everything and you have, you know, you have another life that you have to consider. And this is this is the needs of a baby are different than the needs of an adult, and so you're you start looking at things like, all right, well, is this detergent going to be too is this is this is not going to be good for my baby? Should I Should I go with something that's going to be more gentle or you know, they're lot of different considerations, and Targets got well, gigs and gigs and gigs of data about customer behaviors, and so there's a huge amount of market research that has sort of indicated what behaviors are suggests that a person is going to have a baby that when you start seeing these changes, that's a very good indicator that that person is planning on the fact that they're going to have a child. So, in this case, Targets sent some electronic coupons to a to a young lady, a teenager, who who had exhibited some of these new behaviors, right, and the new behavior has triggered at the algorithm that says, hey, this person is expecting expecting, and they're going to go ahead and automatically send this stuff out right. And the problem here was that this young lady had not divulged the information about her her status to her father, and her father's saw the coupons from Target and sent a very angry email to a Target manager and said, uh, you know, why are you saying this about my daughter? How dare you? This is you know, insensitive? Um are you trying to encourage her to have a baby? She's far too young? And then the manager was trying to find a way to respond to this angry father when later on another email came in from the father who said, I had a discussion with my daughter. It turns out there were some things going on I didn't know about. Uh, this was not the way I would have liked to have found out, but I was in the wrong. But this really brought a lot of attention towards the practice of using customer information to react proactively, which in some cases you would think that's that's kind of cool, you know, It's it's a little creepy in a way that that the retailer knows that kind of information about you just based upon your your habits. But then you realize you are giving the retailer information by the way you shop, that just just by the way you shop. It's not even your name or your address or any of that. As long as they have some sort of customer identifier number that is attached to you, even if they don't know your name, if it's just, if it's just this number designates this particular shopper, and this particular shopper has behaved in this way, then they can start to draw conclusions about what's going on in your life. Now, there's a leap here really that has to be made, uh for for Target or really any of these other retailers, because they're far from alone and do it. Then when when we're using this, we're simply using Target as an example, it's not that they are unique in this at all. Yeah, they are one of many, many retailers who do this, UM, But there's there's a leap that needs to be made here. Now Target is not collecting or or any of these companies in general. We'll just say a retailer not necessarily collecting this stuff. To identify Jonathan Strickland as being somebody who particularly likes a specific brand of coffee, they want to know that number, you know, whatever his customer number is at the retailer likes these products, he's more inclined to buy this than that UM, and they want to give him a positive experience. So they are trying to tailor the the customer experience as much as they can. Um. When I go to example Target, UM, when the little coupon prints out, when I, uh, you know, swipe my card and we get our our stuff that we get there, UM, the coupon printer will print out something a coupon for something that I've bought, and not necessarily on this shopping trip. They've gotten very good at um printing out stuff that it's specific to what I buy with them. And so it's not that it's not that they're trying to breach somebody's privacy. The leap here is that it could be used to find out information about Jonathan Strickland or Chris poll At personally. Yes, UM, so yeah, it's it's it's it's a delicate matter on how you handle that personal information. Whether that means that you know, you don't want to make your customers feel like they are being spied upon, that that is a bad outcome, and then also you want to make sure that whatever the information you have is secure and and preferably in most cases not connected to an individual by name or other personal identification, so that there might be an a customer profile on you, but that profile does not directly link to your identity. Well, think about companies like Netflix or Amazon dot Com that make recommendations based on things that you've bought before or or consumed before and in the case of Netflix, something you've watched um and they make recommendations. That's something that we tend to value about those services. It makes it them collecting that information makes it more enjoyable. Yeah, they're curating their their collections for us so that it's less work for us. And then it's it's the joy of discovery seems so much more palpable because you don't have to go through, you know, a five thousand movie titles before you find one that actually sounds interesting to you. So let's get back over to the actual privacy Bill of Rights. Now, the idea of of legislating our rights to privacy isn't new in the United States. It kind of began in the late nineteenth century. So the eighteen nineties is about when we really started to, uh, look at ways of protecting privacy through US law. Apart from the guarantees that are in the Constitution that state you know, your your guarantee against unlawful search and seizure when it could be an entire episode all on its own, and in fact, I think we have talked about that on its own. But anyway, Uh, it's that's not a new idea, but the idea of trying to create this this uh privacy set of guidelines for the online world is new because it's it's a different kind of exchange of information than we've had in the past. And so the actual documents of the Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights, they're their online so you can go and read them yourselves if you want to. The it's quite detailed. Yeah, there's it's the actual Bill of Rights themselves. That that that's probably about I think it's fourteen pages of text just for the Bill of Rights. And then there's a lot more about, um, how will that be enforced or how could it be enforced? Because this is not this is not being enacted into United States law yet. That's something that's being discussed. It's a proposal, and this is a proposal coming from President Obama's administration. It's not even it's not coming out of Congress. So this would have to go into Congress to be debated and tweaked and destroyed, and then rebuilt and then either passed or not passed, and then go to the President who would then either signed it into law or not. So here's some of the the the language from the bill itself and the the introduction. There's like an introduce there's like a foreword and introduction and executive summary every single section of this. By the way, when you read that first paragraph, feels like the opening paragraph to a college student's term paper. So it's like you're having to read five different openings of a term paper before you get to the content. But I'm gonna I'll read a little bit here. This is This kind of explains the reason why the administration felt like this was necessary. Citizens who feel protected from misuse of their personal information feel free to gauge in commerce, to participate in political process, or to seek needed healthcare. This is why we have laws that protect financial privacy and health privacy, and that protect consumers against unfair and deceptive uses of their information. This is why the Supreme Court has protected anonymous political speech, the same right exercise by the pamphleteers of the early Republican today's bloggers. So this was sort of there. There. The argument by the administration saying that privacy is a very important component in life. It's something that we need in order to feel that we can securely pursue very important matters in our lives without without the fear of that information falling into the wrong hands, are being misused in any way, or or being used to lie to us. You know, once people find out more about us, they start to learn what we're vulnerable to, and further on it goes. These rights give consumers clear guidance on what they should expect from those who handle their personal information and set x aspectations for companies that use personal data. I call him these companies to begin immediately working with privacy advocates, consumer protection enforcement agencies, and others to implement these principles in enforceable codes of conduct. My administration will work to advance these principles and work with Congress to put them into law. With this Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights, we offer the world a dynamic model of how to offer strong privacy protection and enable ongoing innovation in new information technologies. One thing should be clear. Even though we live in a world in which we share personal information more freely than in the past, we must reject the conclusion that privacy is an outmoded value. It has been at the heart of our democracy from its inception, and we need it now more than ever. I think that's a shot across the bowl of a certain social networking founder. Do you know who I'm talking about? Does he have curly hair and really disagrees with a pair of twin Yes? And he also he so can explain the excitement of a logarithmic scale in great detail at a press conference. Yes, we're talking about Mark Zuckerberg, who who infamously at this point a couple of years ago, said that he felt that he thought he thought that privacy was dying out as a social norm. Now, what he meant by that was that the average person no longer really seemed to feel that privacy was that important, or rather, they didn't feel inhibited in any way from sharing information that perhaps a generation ago people would never have pushed out to the public. So it's not exactly a direct contradiction, because what Zuckerberg was saying was that we just don't feel as as uh, we don't feel the need to keep stuff back as much as we used to. It's not that we should ignore privacy concerns. More, it was more that we just don't see it as being as important as we used to. Uh. Meanwhile, people have proven that Zuckerberg feels very differently about his own personal privacy because they've breached it multiple times and he has not found it very amusing. And again I don't think that was his point. I don't think his point was that we shouldn't worry about privacy. It was more that people in general just don't seem to find it as important. Well, it's one of those situations too, I think where it sort of ended up as a SoundBite type of thing. He said it in the public, in a public forum, and and uh, it's you know, hey, it's a quote. It's a direct quote, so well, not exactly what you just said, but just to clarify in case somebody writes in sure, but yeah, he did say those things, and people said, hey, you know, Mark says privacy is dead, and which was definitely an oversimplification of what he was saying. But but also, you know, it's when you're speaking off the cuff, it's also really easy to give a sound bite that doesn't entirely absolute what you're thinking exactly. We've We've had that same situation here many many times. So let's get into the actual Bill of rights. I guess yeah, I figure it's probably UM, although it's kind of thick in places. We should probably get into the specific provisions. There are seven I believe that are are UM where they're trying to to work with people to make this happen. Yeah, they're there. The the language refers to them as PHIPS, f I, P P S PHIPS because they are fair Information Practice Principles or philps. Yeah. I I actually skimmed ahead and was reading and I started seeing references to PHIPS, and it was before I saw what the breakout was for the acronym. And I had many enjoyable moments trying to come up with what PHIPS could stand for. None of them, none of them were right, by the way, anyway. That's that's that's tangential. Well. One of the first is uh, the individual control of your personal information. Basically, they're saying that you you should be the one in charge of whether or not you give this information away and what happens to it. So essentially, what this is saying is that whenever you are signing up for any sort of service, or or a site or whatever that when they the company or organization asks for your information, you have the right to either give the information or not give the information. And furthermore, you can actually uh dictate how that information will be used. So in other words, um, you know, if you give the information to the company, if you choose to do it, uh, you should still be able to say, hey, you know, I want I'm giving this information to you, but I'm doing it so that you can do this set of things and nothing beyond that set of things. So that's interesting. I'm wondering how how well that will be enforced. Uh. And a lot of these, by the way, we're going to go through them all, but a lot of these are going to kind of overlap each other or complement each other, so there will be some some similarities throughout these these these uh rights, these fips. Yes, yes, Now the second is transparency. So so what they're saying is the company should tell you upfront or during the entire time that you have an account with them that exactly how your information is going to be used. Um and and for what means? They also privacy and security? Yes, yes, they also the security was what I was going to address. They also have to let you know how your data is going to be protected, because yeah, it's Again that's one of the reasons why this this this legislation or proposed guidelines. I guess I shouldn't say legislation proposed guidelines. It's why they were. Part of the reason why they exist is because people when they are signing over information to a company, a lot of us just kind of a him that it's sort of sitting in a database somewhere, but that's it, like it's not doing anything else and it's completely secure. That's not always the case. I mean, you want to know if if your information is can be encrypted, is it being saved in plain text? Plain text, by the way, is what we call a bad thing. Um, encrypted is better? Uh, And when it's being used between companies, like if we're talking about information that ultimately is going to be used in order to get advertisers to send you information or to post ads on the site that you're visiting all the time, you want to make sure that, however they are conveying your information to the advertiser, that it's secure. Yes, and they need to make sure that that is easily understood and easily available to to check out. So that's the whole transparency issue. Then there's respect for context, and this is one of those that sort of sounds a little bit like in an overlap because what they're saying is, um, let's say you've agreed to their the company's terms. Um, the company should respect that you've agreed to those terms. So, um, you've agreed to let your information be shared with select advertisers, but they shouldn't go out and give it to and sell your name to random mailing lists because within you've had the context of I'm signing up for this, within these boundaries, and they're saying you can't take it past that. That's very good. And then the next is security, which of course I've just chatted about. But this way that you know, the transparency is letting you know how and and uh, your data is being protected. This is actually saying protect the data. Yeah, because it says that consumers have a right to secure and responsible handling of personal data. So this is this is actually putting it on those sites and services to make sure that the information you give them is protected reasonably from a sort of intrusion or it could be anything from a hacker hacking their way into the servers, to someone walking into the company and physically taking a machine out of the company because that has happened. You know, we we often think when we're thinking about stealing information, we often think about the whole Hollywood style where the cute, nerdy chick is sitting down at a at a laptop and after about uh, you know, I don't know, thirty seconds of typing on a keyboard and then you just you know, you see like the little progress bar filling up and as the USB drive is is getting all the information. Meanwhile the security guys are closing in. Will she get away? Well, I'm watching, um yeah, where hels their team? You know, Chloe Man. Anyway, So the other way you could do it is you could have like a big guy named Al just walks into the building, picks up a computer and leaves, and then just all the information on the computer is right there by the way. It does not he does not have to be called out, nor does he have to be a big guy. I'm here from the computer cleaners. Okay, it's right over there. Yeah exactly. Yeah. That's social engineering, and that happens way more frequently than the whole. Let's breach this thing by you know, brute forcing the password. Social engineering is much more effective if you can walk up and talk to somebody and convince them that you are the person who needs to do this one particular thing. It's amazing how frequently that works. What happened to number seventeen? Oh it's the cleaners. What do you mean, the cleaners that had all our customer dad on it? What one? Access and accuracy five? And basically, people have a right to be able to get to their personal data and make changes to it if they need to make sure it's correct. Um, so, things like if you have changed your address, or if you've changed an important status in your life. You've gotten married, or maybe you've got divorced, or maybe you've had kids or you know, it's complicated. Yeah, yeah, it's it's the Facebook. It's complicated, but it's where you want to be able to go in there and make those changes so that the information is still accurate. And um yeah, I mean that just makes sense. And I think most companies tend to do that, I mean, because they want to have the most accurate information about you. It doesn't do them any good if the information they have about you is on a date, you know, that's not the reason they don't care. Ultimately, I think most of these companies don't really care about your personal information on a on a personal level at all. It's not like they're trying to spy on you to figure out what you are doing in any you know, for any nefarious purposes. Uh. It's all about profit really when it comes down to it, or some in some cases, it's about trying to tailor the experience so that it is the most meaningful to you, which is feels a little more altruistic, but ultimately it does come down to dollars and cents and not so much of we're watching you sorry stuff they don't want you to know shout out. And then there's um one of my favorites, focused collection, which is basically saying we're not going to collect or the company is not allowed to collect anything else other than the stuff it needs to do its job. Yeah. So in other words, if you sign up for a coupon site, let's say a coupon service, Yeah, that's going to deliver coupons that are of interest to you, uh and are applicable to you in your region. So we're talking about something like group on, right, Okay, something like group on where you sign up, and part of group on is that you tell it where you live, because you know, it doesn't want to send you coupons for a place that's a thousand miles away. It doesn't do you any good. And you tell group on what you're interested in, so that way it's sending you relevant coupons. Because if you are really interested in outdoor adventures, but you don't have a whole lot of interest in pottery, then you don't want to keep getting you know, invites to go take another pottery class. You know that's just not that's not what you care about. Well, then that information makes perfect sense for a group on to pull from you. You know, your address or your zip code or whatever, your the region you are in, and what you're interested in, but other things might not matter so much like it would, it wouldn't matter for the service the group on is providing to you. So things like the names of all your relatives, your social Security number, your birth date, your driver's license number, this kind of information is not relevant to the service Groupon is providing, and therefore, according to this bill of rights, group on should not ask you for it, nor should you feel compelled to share it, because why would they need that to do what they do. You're you're never gonna let me live down that pottery skydiving class, are you? You know? Uh? He tells me that it was always supposed to be an ash tray, but I am absolutely certain that originally that wasn't going to be an urn Like, oh, let's move on. So one of the things that they're talking about embracing is something that UH that has been around for a while now, the do not Track technology, which is really less of a technology and more of an agreement UM. In a way, it's sort of like a gentleman's agreement between an advertiser and UH and the the customer UM, and the technology behind it is browser based, so UH UM Firefox, the most recent versions of Firefox have do not Track in there, and Mozilla baked it in there so that you could say, hey, i'm It's basically a little information that goes along with a query first site that says I don't want to be tracked, and you you go to visit, you know, my wonderful sandwich dot com, and you know, if my wonderful sandwich dot com decides that now that lunch is over, they want to know what else, what other kinds of foods you like? Um, you know they don't have to participate in the agreement at all, but you've already told them that you don't want to. Now, if they're behaving responsibly, they might say all right, no, no, we know, we know you're just looking for lunch, No big deal. Um. But now they're they're trying to uh, they're trying to get more people to embrace that. And I know that Google has said it will add that to Chrome um as well. So you know this this may end up being part of the technology that helps support this this legislation, and it becomes legislation. And this falls into what is the final FIP, which is accountability. Yes, and accountability is all about the fact that the wording in the actual document is that consumers have a right to have personal data handled by companies with appropriate measures in place to assure they adhere to the Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights. And that's that's what we're talking about here, is that you know, you have a right to uh, to be able to use a browser that's not going to necessarily collect all that information without you knowing it, or not even a browser. But like search engines. You know, again we're talking about Google here, mainly other search engines too, But you know, if you're using Google and you're searching for stuff all day long like some of us, you know, I do it all day long. That's my job is you know, search information and pull it together and write articles. Um. Then you know, you'd like to have a little more control over that so that you don't have all these different potential companies and organizations having access to your personal information and making decisions about you over which you have no control. So it's nice to have that kind of power as an individual. And but fairly recently there have been some reports about how companies like Google have signed on with this, saying that this is this is a great idea, and you might think this this these guidelines sound like they could potentially, you know, put a dent in some business here. Well, there are a couple of reasons why or a couple of reasons why Google and other companies like Google might be behind the guidelines that aren't exactly like, yes, we also believe in privacy, uh not to say that that motivation isn't there. It may very well be, but there are other alternative reasons why they might be behind this, and one of those is that, well, it's a good PR move to say customer privacy is one of our main concerns as well, and we want to make sure that we're doing the right thing, so that's a good PR move. Another is this isn't legislation. It's not baked into law, so there's no real danger in saying sure, as opposed to opposing it, because there was actual legislation in California for a state, uh, legislation that would kind of approach the same sort of subject matter as these this this bill of rights, and companies like Google were very much non in favor of it. So when it when it moved to the actual legislation phase, there was a lot more opposition. Now right here where it's not where it's a great idea, but it's not really enforceable, not from a legal standpoint. It could be enforceable if companies took it upon themselves to enforce it on their own practices, but there's no teeth behind it right now. Uh, there's nothing dangerous about saying, sure, let's do it, So there's that as well. And you know, again, I don't want to I don't want to say that any company has a particular motivation. I'll just say that the behaviors when it was in California legislation debate and the behaviors when it's in a proposal that doesn't have any legal backing to it are different. That's what I'm saying. Yeah, So we were talking a little bit about about how things will be enforced, and the Federal Trade Commission would be the department of the United States government that would be responsible for making sure that UH companies behave themselves and and follow the guidelines set forth and this um uh in this document and UH, well you know, I don't know how much they'd be able to do that. That's the problem. See, at this point, this document is not as as Jonathan pointed out, it's not legislation. It's not a proposed legislation. It's really more of a set of guidelines. So what the legislation would be would be actually more about how it would be enforced, and it would it would set forth those uh instructions on how they would move going forward. And keep in mind that if this were to enter uh, legislation like if it was if it would if it enters that as, then the changes that would be made to the language would possibly be quite drastic, and it could be that the outcome is completely different than what this proposal is. So that's it's pretty much a guarantee, even not completely different, but significantly different. Yeah. Yeah, well I think uh, I think the idea behind it is sound. There are are several of the UM agencies that have been UM outspoken in rights, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation. UH, they're all about that, yes, and they basically said, hey, we like the idea behind it, were interested to see what's going to happen. So UM, it will be interesting to see how it goes forward and how whether or not it inspires others and UH and other places to create similar legislation and maybe curtail some of this or or you know, give people a good idea of how their information is being used. And honestly, I think that is probably the biggest, UM most useful thing that would come out of that too, because people really want to use these services UM and companies, you know, everybody's sort of an agreement, but it would be nice to know how information is being stored and exactly what's being collected and then not that excess information is not being used um and and retained if it it doesn't need to be there in the first place. At least that's my opinion. I agree entirely. All well, and uh yeah, it'll be you know, we'll have to see how this turns out. I mean, the whole argument about privacy and what people should be uh, what's reasonable for us to expect us consumers, how much of that responsibility falls on us versus the the entities that are gathering our information. That debate is going to go on for a while, probably forever. It'll it'll switch back and forth quite a bit. But it's just to remember that when you go and you sign up for these things, whether it's a social networking site or an even an app that you might put on a smartphone, keep in mind that a lot of these companies, you know, they're they're making some serious cash off your personal information. Personal information is the digital currency, right and so uh, you know, just do a little thinking about that, some critical thinking about how your information is going to be used. And really it comes down to, right now, are you okay with that? And if you are okay with that, if you if you trust the source and you feel that your information is in capable hands and you don't mind it being used for advertising purposes or whatever, then you're fine. If you feel that it's not the right thing for you, then you might want to, you know, give a second thought to actually joining that side or or engaging that service. It's a tough you know, it's a of choice to make sometimes because sometimes we just want something so badly that we're willing to uh to cut some corners that could potentially come back to haunt us and uh, you know, and then there are cases where we have no control over it whatsoever. Like the Epsilon hack is a good example where you know, the consumers who had their information stolen in the Epsilon hack weren't dealing with Epsilon directly. They were dealing with companies that were customers of Epsilon. And so you know that that was one of those things that was really tough, a really tough situation because if you you might trust the company you're doing business with, but you don't necessarily know what companies they're doing business with, right, and a lot of people who signed up for that didn't realize they were signing up for that because um, by and large, the companies that had their information stored with Epsilon were retailers, and people had signed up for loyalty cards not realizing that, uh or I guess probably not thinking about the idea that hey, they're going to put this on a computer somewhere and that computer could be hacked and my personal information could be taken. Um not like signing up for an account on a computer where you're saying, I am entering this information into the computer myself. Um. So there was a bit of an intermediary there where you're going, oh, well, I'm giving I filled this out by hand, and I handed it to the guy at the service desk, and he gave me a card that I'm going to go use and buy some groceries. Now. Yeah. Yeah. To the average consumer, it probably felt more like using a coupon. Yeah, and then put clip a coupon out of a piece of paper and you you you use it when you buy something you know that's not attached to you at all, and it's between you and this real retailer. Well, as it turns out, all those retailers are working with this one company, yeah that had massive databases and yes, yeah, so it's it's a sticky issue and it's gonna be it's just gonna get more and more important because again, like the whole visibility of of security hacking has increased over the last i'd say, like five or ten years, and uh, it doesn't look like the hackers are giving up anytime soon. Right. So anyway, well, that's our discussion about the Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights. Uh it we'll see whether or not it's ever put into law, and if it turns out to be an effective piece of legislation, all of that's still in question. If you guys have any ideas for topics that we should cover here on tech Stuff, please let us know. You can email us. Our address is tech stuff at Discovery dot com, or you can sume us a message via Twitter or Facebook or handle. There is tech Stuff hs W and Chris and I will tell you again really soon. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how Stuff Work staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The house Stuff Works I find app has a right download it today on iTunes, brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you