Getting tech giants to behave

The following is an excerpt from an editorial on Bloomberg View:

Online, everything is forever. Facebook’s most recent scandal — in which it allowed an outside company to furtively collect its users’ data on a huge scale — caused an uproar in large part because the people affected thought they were taking a harmless quiz; instead, their answers were stored for years and used in ways they never expected.

This kind of thing will keep happening so long as online privacy is governed by the concept of consent. Is there a better way? One idea, proposed by Jack Balkin of Yale Law School, is for online service providers to be deemed “information fiduciaries.” Much as a lawyer must protect a client’s confidentiality, these companies would be re- quired to act in the best interests of their users when handling sensitive data.

Something similar could be applied to online service providers.

They could agree (say) to refrain from using data in unexpected or deceitful ways, pledge to share it only with trustworthy third parties for a limited purpose, and commit to handling it responsibly. “Their central obligation,” as Balkin puts it, would be “that they cannot act like con artists — inducing trust in their endusers to obtain personal information and then betraying end-users or working against their interests.”

With information fiduciaries, the internet, where everything is forever, would be a more honest place to do business — or whatever else you want to do.