Online privacy controls are like DRM. They are both attempts to control what happens to information after giving someone else complete control over it.
"We may not mind sharing our personal lives and thoughts, but we want to control how, where and with whom. A privacy failure is a control failure."
Paraphrase: "We may not mind consumption of our music and movies, but we want to control how, where and with whom. A copy restriction failure is a control failure."
If a video can be decrypted for viewing, it can be decrypted for torrenting. If Facebook can show your messages to your friends, they can show them to advertisers.
Bruce suggests legislation, but I'm afraid it will be as futile as the DMCA.
There are crucial differences between online privacy controls and DRM in not only in what kinds of information are covered, but how, and who is limited. DRM is about technological controls weaved into the information itself, applicable to all its consumers. Online privacy controls are voluntary promises made by single actors, such as Facebook and its partners.
It would be more apt to compare Bruce Schneier's proposed privacy legislation to the original introduction of copyright law than to the DMCA. Right now basic privacy laws hardly exist (EU excepted), and in their place is a frontier of one-sided contracts that change at the discretion of the information recipients. It would be skipping a step or two to go straight to DMCA-like additional legislation to prop up technological controls that attempt to narrowly enforce the basic legislation, when we haven't even figured out what the basic legislation would be.
Another big difference is the asymmetry between the number of producers and recipients: privacy is about relatively few companies receiving data belonging to many people, while copyright is about many people receiving information from fewer authors. Among other effects, that would tend to make enforcement of privacy easier than copyright, since the potential lawbreakers would be both fewer and highly visible. Facebook breaking a law is a big deal, and therefore difficult even without any technological restrictions. (Of course, getting such a law passed would be another story, and comes down to whether privacy sufficiently captures the public's imagination.)
This is a very astute comparison, but the power relationships involved are so different that we may be able to treat the two situations differently. The DMCA fails in practice because the violators are millions of isolated individuals, and trying to stop them is like trying to carry water in a sieve. A comparable website privacy act would be trying to protect the individuals from the corporations, and corporations are bigger, are easier to hit, and have more to lose. So I think it's not necessarily as futile as the DMCA.
Online privacy controls are like DRM. They are both attempts to control what happens to information after giving someone else complete control over it.
"We may not mind sharing our personal lives and thoughts, but we want to control how, where and with whom. A privacy failure is a control failure."
Paraphrase: "We may not mind consumption of our music and movies, but we want to control how, where and with whom. A copy restriction failure is a control failure."
If a video can be decrypted for viewing, it can be decrypted for torrenting. If Facebook can show your messages to your friends, they can show them to advertisers.
Bruce suggests legislation, but I'm afraid it will be as futile as the DMCA.