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September 14, 2007
EPIC: Google's "Privacy Crusade" Is a Preemptive Weasel Strike
The Washington Post's headline writers were in a particularly credulous mood when they came up with "Google Launches Global Privacy Crusade."
On the other hand, look at what they had to work with:
Drawing upon its clout as the Internet's most powerful company, Google Inc. is calling on businesses and regulators throughout the world to adopt international standards for protecting consumer privacy online and offline.
Hooray! Google is throwing its might into the battle for our privacy! Today we are all Googleheads!
It might seem so if, like the Washington Post, you interviewed EPIC's executive director but somehow fail to get what CNET got from the same source:
Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, called the APEC Privacy Framework "backward looking" and said it "is the weakest international framework for privacy protection, far below what the Europeans require or what is allowed for transatlantic transfers between Europe and the U.S.," particularly because it focuses on the need to show harm to the consumer."
In fact, what the Post got out of the story is what a lot of reporters seem to settle on: Rather than writing a story questioning the substance of Google's security proposal (which Rotenberg did), the reporter focused on inside baseball: Whether Google's making this particular proposal at this particular time for a reason besides its abiding love of privacy.
Motive is easy to cover, right? One guy impugns another guy's intent so the reporter just gets the initial assertion, then a counter-assertion: Scales are balanced, he said/she-said, utterly "balanced" in that way "balanced" has come to mean "make sure each side has an equal number of facts."
But the problem is, why Google is doing this has nothing to do with the quality of the policy Google's proposing. That would be hard to cover in a story because you have to understand the policy, understand why someone else thinks it's problematic, then understand how to outline the argument for the casual observer.
So, you know ... just go with the Google narrative, leave aside the substantive issues Google's proposals raise, and call people who have an issue with Google's policy "strident."
Posted by mhall at 6:10 PM | Add Comment
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