“Nothing has shown how fast privacy practice is evolving as much as Facebook’s recent controversy over its research experiment altering users’ newsfeeds to see if different feeds made them more happy or sad,” writes Brookings Institution Distinguished Visiting Fellow Cameron Kerry. “Crafting privacy policies has been an exercise in drafting to describe uses of information in enough depth and detail to provide full disclosure but enough breadth and generality to leave room for other conceivable uses and also (as data use evolves rapidly) some not yet conceived,” he adds. In this post for Privacy Perspectives, Kerry, who is the former General Counsel and Acting Secretary of the U.S. Department of Commerce, discusses the burgeoning ethical implications of data use and the role “privacy professionals, lawyers and compliance officers” have as the “first line of defense in bringing ethical and prudential judgment to bear.”
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