Legal Geek No. 38: Good and Bad Developments for Privacy Law

Welcome back to Legal Geek. This week, we take a look at two recent innovations about to affect everyday life and how differences between them are critical according to privacy law experts.

https://archive.org/details/LegalGeekEp38

Starting next month, Visa will commercially release location-tracking software to many banks, meaning your local bank and credit card companies will offer a location tracking identity safety feature on smartphone apps. This innovation will automatically notify Visa when you travel more than 50 miles from home, helping to avoid flagging non-local transactions as fraudulent when it really is you. As someone who has had a card declined in this manner when trying to buy Bacardi rum in Puerto Rico directly from the distillery, trust me when I say this innovation could avoid some embarrassing situations.

Normally having any private corporation such as a bank track your movements sounds like a real infringement of a consumer's privacy rights, but for frequent travelers, this may properly balance lowering risk of identity theft with a minor increase in information given to a corporation about you. Privacy experts applaud this innovation because the bank apps will need customers to opt-in to use this location tracking, and the opt-in can be deactivated at any time. That means the consumer fully controls when it is needed for the bank to know travel is occurring.

Also becoming more widespread next month will be the use of Google's newly developed ReCAPTCHA login authentication functionality on many third party websites. Instead of standard CAPCTHA which tries to screen out bots by forcing typing of distorted text, the ReCAPTCHA analyzes behavioral cues such as typing cadence, where clicks occur, etc., to determine if you are a human. But this authentication process collects a significant amount of information that could actually identify who the human user is, not just that the user is human. That adds to the substantial profile Google maintains on computer users already, and expands it to many third party site activities as well.

Much like the original CAPTCHA, there is no real opt-in for users of these websites, the new regime just must be accepted. That, plus the lack of much control over what Google can do with this collected information, renders this innovation as one which privacy law experts condemn as possibly a step too far.

Bottom line - when it comes to new innovations which make life more convenient and efficient, sometimes it is better to accept a bit less personal privacy to obtain these benefits. But the ability of consumers to actually control what is shared and when is vital to long-term trust of these companies collecting the information, and companies need to remember that. Privacy law experts certainly will.
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