Professor Jonathan Askin spoke to Law360 about the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) decision to fine Google $23 million for violating a commitment they made to protect user privacy by placing tracking cookies on Safari browsers. Experts explain the large penalty will put pressure on other companies to comply with FTC privacy orders.
Professor Jonathan Askin noted that companies should adopt privacy policies that clearly and honestly state their intentions in order to avoid future fines. “If you've got a privacy policy, you'd better do what you say you are going to do,” he said. “Tracking itself is not evil; it's saying that you're not going to track and then breaking that promise that's the problem. If it could happen to an entity like Google that goes through painstaking efforts to maintain its policy, it could definitely happen to small companies that slapped together a privacy policy at the last minute.”
Read the full article.