Now, Mr. Vladeck indicated, the commission would begin considering not just whether companies caused monetary harm, but whether they violated consumers’ dignity. “There’s a huge dignity interest wrapped up in having somebody looking at your financial records when they have no business doing that,” he said.
While various highly-paid industry lawyers are quoted in the piece claiming that providing consumers with protection against manipulation will wreak havoc on the Internet economy, the FTC's efforts are based on both the FTC Act's prohibition on unfair and deceptive practices and on the
Fair Information Practices, which prohibit secret databases, prohibit secondary use of information without informed consent, limit collection, require use specificity, etc.
At another level, though, when Vladeck talks about dignity, he is recognizing what two young lawyers, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis, postulated (after Cooley) in the Harvard Law Review over 100 years ago as the "right to be let alone." Later, as a Supreme Court Justice, Brandeis, in a famous dissent in what was I think the court's first electronic privacy case (Olmstead, wiretapping) later expanded that to say:
[privacy is] "the right to be let alone—the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.”
Expect fierce pushback from industry lobbyists who will say this: "People selling stuff on the Internet need to be able to spy on and take advantage of our customers in order to manipulate them. We need secret tools that match their online behavior data points with their offline lives. Otherwise, we won't make money and the Internet will go away, the civilized world will come to an end and we will be living in caves." Only in Washington.
