Boztopia.com

As the great thespian Will Smith might say, “Aw, hell naw:”

AT&T is funding a group run by some of the nation’s top privacy experts that aims to influence policy in the Obama administration and develop best practices on privacy for businesses. Called Future of Privacy, the organization will be announced Wednesday. Its Web site, www.futureofprivacy.org, is set to go live Monday.

Seriously? AT&T? The same company that opposes net neutrality, spied on you illegally, and is going to be the cornerstone for a completely privatized and outsource intelligence-gathering network that searches the Internet for your personal data on behalf of both the NSA and Hollywood? That AT&T?

I love the smell of astroturf in the morning. It smells like bullshit.

I took a look at the forum’s advisory board, and it’s got some laudable people on it. You can’t front on the work of Chris Hoofnagle or Daniel Solove, for instance. I’m also familiar with Carol DiBattiste from her time at ChoicePoint (We sparred a bit over their infamous sale of personal identity records to Nigerian criminals), and Nuala O’Connor Kelly from her tumultuous time at DHS. So this isn’t a complete hack job we’re looking at here.

But I’m largely in agreement with Mandy Simon that this looks like yet another front group of the usual suspects–lawyers, industry experts, and a token academic or two to represent the “consumer” viewpoint. No ACLU? No EFF? Come on now. Let’s do what the Chronicle and TPM Muckraker did and call this for what it is–an attempt by industries that traffic in consumer data to preempt any serious consideration of online privacy standards, in order to implement their own weak guidelines. The Obama/Biden team has made improving online privacy and safety standards a major plank of their technology platform, so AT&T and its partners in this farce forum want to make sure their ideas get to the head of the line ahead of anyone else’s.

Here’s the thing. I’m not against the idea of businesses, government, academia, and the like working together to create and implement smart, usable standards for collecting and sharing data online. We’ve already seen what happens when well-intentioned laws designed to protect children go awry, for example–they end up becoming tools for marketers to harvest data for selling crap to your kids. But the fact that AT&T is the first funder of this enterprise is a strong sign that no good is going to come of it.

I’m willing to keep an open mind, but you can damn well bet I’ll also be keeping an open eye or two on this organization as it develops.