PRISM: Bringing The Need for Better Transparency and Privacy Into Focus

A small silver lining to the PRISM scandal is that it has created the impetus for several large technology companies to finally start giving the public a glimpse into how the government is regularly dipping into their treasure trove of personal information. You may want to check out our handy new chart for a quick rundown of what's been said and done by which companies- from statements, to transparency reports, to more recent legal efforts by Google and Yahoo to push back against government secrecy (let us know if we're missing anything).

It's been clear for a long time that the public has been largely in the dark about the real costs of many "free" Internet services. Few have had a proper understanding that the more we do online, the more digital footprints we leave behind. And once personal information about who we are, what we do, where we go, and who we know is collected and retained, outdated and inadequate privacy laws are failing to keep our personal information safe from being shared, sold, and turned over to a snooping government.

If technology companies want to try to regain public trust, they are going to back up all this recent talk with action in the courts, the legislature, and within their campuses. This means not just paying lip service to transparency and privacy, but pushing for us to know the true nature and scope of government demands and the secret spy programs, supporting efforts to strengthen current legal protections for personal information from FISA to ECPA and basic transparency laws like the California Right to Know Act (AB 1291), and deploying privacy enhancing technologies, like HTTPS by default and encryption for transmission between servers, that would better protect users from improper NSA interception.

We are long overdue for a privacy upgrade to match the modern online world. The revelations about PRISM just bring its importance into greater focus.

Nicole A. Ozer is the Technology and Civil Liberties Policy Director with the ACLU of Northern California.