August 11th, 2009
Rule change will bring Web 2.0 to federal sites
There’s Internet time. And then there’s government time. In the case of cookies, the two are wildly divergent. Back in 2000 (that was the year of IE 5 and Netscape 6 and we were four years from Firefox 1.0), regulations were passed that banned government websites from using cookies. That was the big privacy concern then. These days, of course, turning off cookies is a completely unworkable experience, because social networking is inherently dependent on identifying who you are.
Thus, The Washington Post reports, the Obama Administration is seeking to update those rules so that government sites can include modern apps.
In a White House blog post, CIO Vivek Kundra and OMB official Michael Fitzpatrick explained the need for the rule change:
The goal of this review is to develop a new policy that allows the Federal Government to continue to protect the privacy of people who visit Federal websites while, at the same time, making these websites more user-friendly, providing better customer service, and allowing for enhanced web analytics.
But any change to privacy rules sets off alarm bells in certain privacy circles. An ACLU spokesman said the change would “allow the mass collection of personal information of every user of a federal government website.”
A more reasonable response comes from EFF and the Center for Democracy and Technology:
The time has come to expand privacy safeguards to new tracking technologies. At the same time, they say that the cookie ban might be too broad, keeping the government from improving its services for the public.
The new rules may only codify special treatment Google has been receiving to allow YouTube on government sites. The contract “expressly waives those rules or guidelines as they may apply to Google.” EPIC’s Marc Rotenberg complained:
“The expectation is they should be complying with the government regulations, not that the government should change its regulations to accommodate these companies.”
But the government said the ban only ever applied to government agencies, not third parties. In any case, it looks like the new rules will go into effect. And that’s a good thing.
