As a people feel that the policy issues of privacy. The commission has been in the spotlight with major cases in the Facebook Cambridge analytical and that youtube settlement and a series of hearings on competition and Consumer Protection in the 21st century with with a lot of that focus with data and privacy. We are fortunate to have with us today to commissioners, rebecca slaughter and christine wilson, both of whom have long background in Public Policy and becca slaughter is on the hill and wilson previously as chief of staff at the commission and both experienced in private law practice and other capacities so i want to jump right into it. Lets begin, if we could with an overview. You started in may of last year, christine in september so you both are about a year on and have experience in cases and hearings. How do you see the privacy we have today . What do you see as the key issues as we move forward . You are the senior commissioner on the panel [laughter] , 18 months of experience now. Thank you for having us. Its nice to be here and nice to be here with christine. This is an issue we both care about and are excited to talk about this together. What are the key issues . Honestly this is an issue which ive given a lot of thought from the perspective of enforcement which is different from the policy perspective that i had and once i had for so long on the hill. A few observations that are key in my mind now. The first is that i think that when we just use the term ivc we may be unintentionally capping ourselves to to narrow a universe of thought about the data issues we are facing because privacy generally refers to sharing of information the people would rather not have shared and there are real harms that paul from that in real sense of values that we need to protect. We need to separate those harms from the harms that flow from the use of that data to turn around for people or target manipulative information or harmful information and my first observation is that ive been trying to think about data abuses rather the narrow frame of data privacy because i dont want us to get to cabin into a universe that prohibits thinking about the full panoply of issues that we are encountering. The second big observation that i would share is i am over noticing consent in this universe. Noticing consent the remark that forms a lot of sec enforcement action in makes sense. Tell people what youre doing with fair data and you keep your promises and we can enforce where you buy or you dont. That sounds reasonable but for noticing consent to be meaningful both notice and consent have to be meaningful and in the space of data i dont think either are particularly. If you take notice first of all, weve all seen the statistics about how long it would take normal people or even very well educated people to read the privacy policies they encounter in a year or months and people dont do it and even if you try to do it i tried to do it and i cant understand what is being done with my data in a lot of cases. I have the best tools at my disposal of basically anyone to do that analysis. I dont think the notice is particularly meaningful and consent is not particularly meaningful because these options are take it or leave it and even if you win the policies you cant turn around and say combined with paragraphs one through eight but please make these edits in nine and then i will click consent. You just have to say yes and often have to say yes to access the Service Necessary for your participation in society. I think we need to reframe the guideposts away from the concept of noticing consent and think more about the expectation. What do consumers expect will be done with their data and what is reasonable from that framework and last point i make and then ill turn it over to christine is that i think we need to be particularly sensitive to how these problems of databases and how the challenges of noticing consent fall disproportionately on vulnerable populations and that is important from a policymaking prioritization standpoint and how we think about enforcement efforts. I think with those observations i will defer to christine. Kim, thank you for having us. Its great to be here and the folks here today will see that we agree on almost everything in this space so. Not to on every issue. My views on privacy and privacy legislation has changed over time and as you mentioned i had the honor of serving [inaudible] when he was chairman of the federal commission into the other one, 2002 and at the beginning of that decade we were grappling with how to deal with privacy issues and is a significant topic of discussion and we brought early cases like eli lilly and the mega soft where its representations were made or data processes resulted in up sharing data in ways consumers would not expect in those were good cases for the ftc to bring and we also brought we created the do not call registry and given the experience we have with robo calls today we realize technology has outpaced the sales rules and in the same way there developers that have outpaced some of the thinking that we did in the early days about how it would be brought to bear. Frankly, we found the authority in this area so i am in favor of regulation and i had to grapple over the last several months with eventually embracing the need for federal privacy legislation and theres a great paper by feel better who explored all the different ways he could address harms and abuses and working through his rubric helped me get comfortable with federal privacy legislation in syria and ultimately as mrs. Need flexibility and certainty in the vast majority want to follow the law but right now theres a lot of gray areas and how to do that and we can all agree on abject principles and how to deal with Consumer Privacy and Data Security and accountability in his risk managements but doing that in an informed way is a difficult without bright line rules and congress and so i think particularly with potentially dcpa coming online and [inaudible] online businesses the that flexibility and i think consumers need more information and significant opacity with respect to with respect to consumer data so i think the average consumer does not understand all of the different Data Collected and what is done with the data once it is collected which shares how it is monetized and how it is transferred to third parties with or without safeguards for the protection of that information and there are significant information and imagery and i would love to see legislation that helps boost that transparency. I believe the consumers can make informed decisions about which services we participate in and avail themselves but without that full information about whats happening those decisions will not be informed and then i think we need privacy education because there are caps that have emerged and evolution and in technology so that that bit that i wear collects health data but is not covered and there are many example like that. I think it has been a long process for me in the year ive been at the commission and the last conversations with becca and my other colleagues that been incredibly patient with me as i work through these issues but im now firmly on the side of meeting federal privacy legislation. Let me explore more on the context and you talked about some additional forms of transparency to increase Consumer Choice and is that enough or do you think there is more needed to address businesses that handle the data beyond consumer. Absolutely. Becca was one of the first people i heard say it in this way but basically it is impossible for consumers to make the decisions that they need to make and so some owners need to see beyond the businesses with a kind ability and with applied Risk Assessments and that sort of thing. I dont think transparency is the beginning and the end of federal privacy legislation and i agree with becca that notice and choice if at all has a useful limited application. So, in that lane when idea the keeps coming up is data ownership and the Senate BankingCommittee Last week had a hearing on that subject and is that simply another form of notice and choice with money thrown into the bargain . I will say not an expert and have not studied policy disposals in the delta my initial reaction is to have anxiety about the idea that if we pay people for their data can solve the problems that we are seeing in privacy and databases. For a month of the reasons data is valuable in aggregate and when many people feel data is collective for many sources and aggregated which means the marginal value of each piece of data is very small so the amount that an individual consumer might realize the monetary value they might realize by being paid for their data actually has a small and were talking about universal people are giving up data without being paid so went a consequence of this likely be that already large countries with more money pay people more to aggregate more data which raises questions serious questions in the competition space as well as in the times he is Consumer Protection space and im not sure what problem it solves because again, forgetting to the point where you for thinking through the lens that data is used in the problematic ways, not just collected in problematic ways facilitating collection by pain people may even exacerbate the use of problems rather than solving them. I have a slightly different in conversations that had people in doj over the last several months and he and i have talked about whether or not that concept of data ownership helps us get to the insert we want so for the good of our target who owns the list of items i purchased and for how much . I need those for my budgeting purposes or inventory or government accounting purposes in the Merchant Bank easy information and who owns that data and so im not sure that talking about data ownership gets us to the answers that we are looking for. You mentioned some of the discussions weve had among commissioners and with others and let me ask you both questions that your colleague knows. This has been raised in other forums and what is the harm that we are trying to prevent . Commissioner wilson. I think its a great question and has a way of focusing the mind and what are the problems we are trying to solve in we dont want to rush and create a vacuum of framework without specifically about the harms that we are attending to address and the ftc already has a vast set of president regarding harms that we view as worthy of avoiding so physical injury and you may want to talk about [inaudible] because you made the announcement there but last year we made the comment about software and its for. Because of privacy jurisdiction, financial, reputational inventory and so we have a case in which computer rental companies actually installed cameras that could be remotely activated and those were in bedrooms. Obviously, the harms that we are seeking to address not limited to potential harms but theres a vast array of harms in the ftc cases provide a wonderful list and overview of the harms it leaves. I think i agree with all of that but i still would have done it. It was our First Software app and you could buy an app and install it on someone elses phone and it came with instructions how to generate the fronts of the present would not be able to know that they were being tracked. This is its not just creepy but lethal in circumstances. Those are incredibly important but it is also important to me and not be the closed universe of harm and so lets think about children, for example. There was a study that came out recently that talked about increase, to medic increase, in teen suicide rates in the u. S. Theres editorial case in the uk of a young woman who took her life at 14 after being the target of online bullying but material that was pushed to her that talked about how to commit suicide with that is indescribably scary and damaging. Thats not a privacy violation in the same way we might have traditionally thought about it but its a real harm from data use, data targeting and i think about about terrorist recruitments or recruitment for hate groups and i think about the targeting of manipulative information to voters and two children and these are all material harms that are important to me in this debate is that we not fall into the trap of thinking we need to be able to quantify her in order to find it quantifiable. Its easy to quantify but need to financial quantify financial harm. Lots of harms are not quantifiable and are still very real. One thing i think that we as an agency need to do and i Hope Congress will do is provide helpful guidance about the harms we think are important but not limit that because i also think there are things we cant anticipate today that will emerge as problems continue to be problems and we need to make sure have the facility to address a merging problems and not just the ones we are aware of now. In terms of harms that are not technically evident but that concern us i am concerned about the impact the Fourth Amendment of essentially developing this sense that nothing is private anymore and in fourth minute law the question is was there a reasonable expectation of privacy that was violated and if in the commercial arena people have the sense that nothing is private anymore how does that impact for the moment jurisprudence when a court or judge making the decision with respect to societal norm was there a reason an expedition of privacy and you have the commercial arena and there is none that has an impact and i am concerned about the erosion from the Fourth Amendment and its not something within the just actions but i think something that we as a society should think about with privacy legislation providing rules about data use and Privacy Protection and expectation and help us reframe the discussion and tell us what is in and what is out of bounds and hopefully provide more guidance to the courts on Fourth Amendment issues. I think we deal with that to some extent by recognizing, as you said, that transactions you have certain interests and your grocery list but so do other people and the question how do we balance those interests . I think that gets us to what may have been a point of departure between you two in the facebook settlement, maybe not so much the point of departure on substance things as such as ftc authority but becca slaughter, you dissented because he wanted to see what you called meaningful limits of what facebook collects, uses and shares. Among other things, yes. But that is always left out on me. Can you flesh that out a little bit . I will go back to the expectation principal that i started with. I think that for the framework for what Data Companies can collect about people starts with what people can recently expect to share. If i is a mapping app i reasonably expect that company to use my location and if i use the flashlight app i do not expect that comedy will need my permission because it does not. I think the first that of limitations should be is the information you are collecting reasonable and necessary to provide the service you are offering. Second, are you using the data in a way that is elected to the service you are offering or are you then going beyond what you are providing to use the data for other information and in the case of facebook, my concern involves the data facebook collects by people beyond what they expect including from third parties and across behavior and across the web not just on the facebook platform and from users who dont anticipate they have any relationship with that company and therefore are sharing information with them. I think these are things that are important but instead of making our framework noticed and choice framework is reasonable expectations of what it has collected and will make more sense in line with not putting with consumers anticipation of how their data will be used and not losing the entire return on them to make they dont have the information or the ability often to meaningfully meet. I do want to say in terms of the disagreement about the facebook outcome i will let christine speak for herself but its fundamentally at the point that i was making was that getting things in settlement negotiations is hard and there may be cases where there things i love to stay in settlement that make it but i supported because the best use of agency resources. In this particular case because of that magnitude of the case and its impact on the markets and the signal it would send and the scope of the companys reit thought was important to fight the court if necessary for the outcome we thought was important at the end of the day but i will also be the first to organize is not maneuver guaranteed to achieve those outcomes at the end of the day. But he thought transparency they came with litigation and finding liability at the end of litigation would be more effective in helping to change the behavior that we uncovered. With respect i dont disagree about seeking how it would be desirable to impose the collection and sharing of information and there was a specific question about whether the ftc within its Current Authority has the ability to do that. We are asking congress to provide those guidelines and to legislate accordingly i did not feel that it was appropriate to legislate for an entire industry through the settlement. So, we had lots of conversations and very helpful to find the same conversations about facebook and frankly, it it was a struggle for me to decide whether to vote in favor of the settlement or to pursue education. I am synthetic to litigation and the transparency that would bring. Ultimately i would convince that consumers need assistance today and the relief we got was real and meaningful and Mark Zuckerberg now has to essentially enter in representations every quarter and he and his company are abiding by the constraints and allegations of the order in early reports indicate that the focusing of the mind is what we saw when we included that requirement in the order is taking place and having a desired effect. Facebook has made tens of thousands of backs in early reports indicate there many other changes taking place behind the scenes and i look forward to being able to talk about those appropriate time and the early reports indicate that the monetary relief there is real change occurring because of this order and that is ultimately what let me to vote in favor of a settlement as opposed to mitigation even though i agree that the benefits of medication my concern is the