In order to support NTIA’s multistakeholder convening around mobile privacy, CDT is setting up an online forum for people to present and discuss ideas related to that effort. Starting today, anyone can go to www.privacymsh.org to contribute by posting to a community message board, suggesting text to a wiki, or signing up for a public email discussion list.
Setting up this site has been a collaborative effort. Ross Schulman from CCIA, Nick Doty from Berkeley, and Cyrus Nemati from CDT all worked together to create privacymsh.org (and all four of us will be administrators on the forum). We decided that having some sort of open forum for discussion might be useful to advance the dialogue during the interims between NTIA meetings (and potentially during the meetings themselves). We are committed to trying to make this collaborative approach to privacy work, and we hope that this site can help all voices be heard as they communicate ideas for promoting mobile privacy (as well as whatever other topics NTIA might tackle).
These tools are very much a work-in-progress; the bare-bones look to the site may change, and the group may eventually decide that something else might work better. We’re not sure whether people will find the message board or the mailing list more effective for generating discussion. On the one hand, emails are an effective way to keep people constantly up to speed on the state of the discussion. However, for those of us involved in the email-intensive W3C Do Not Track policy process, we weren’t sure that people would want to have every discussion point pushed to their inbox. (In any event, the message board is configurable to send email notifications to you when people respond to your points.) We encourage people to experiment to see what’s most effective — these forums are designed to be iterative.
CDT wants to see the NTIA process deliver strong, flexible, and consistent privacy protections for consumers. We hope these discussion tools promote an open and productive dialogue among advocates, industry, and regulators.
