The future of consumer and privacy protection may involve the broader concept of digital trust. Governments and companies both have a critical role to play—if they are willing.

SPEAKERS

Wayne Stacy, Stuart Brotman

 

Wayne Stacy  00:00

Welcome, everyone to the Berkeley Center for Law and technologies expert series Podcast. I'm the Executive Director of BCLT, and your host, Wayne Stacy. Today, we have another discussion with Professor Stuart Brotman. If you recall, Professor Brotman is a professor of Media Management and Law at the University of Tennessee, and also a Distinguished Fellow at the Media Institute. Professor Brotman is pioneering a new model for addressing privacy issues, and addressing the international interaction between the privacy rules that are developing. So Stuart, we've talked about the world gravitating toward an enforcement model for privacy. That really is stick based in a way from an incentive model. That's carrot based. And then we've talked about the issues that arise from multi jurisdictional oversight of privacy here in the US. So kind of in light of what we've already discussed, what do you think's the single biggest unaddressed issue in digital privacy policy today?

 

Stuart Brotman  01:05

Wayne, thanks for inviting me to be here today. So I think the probably biggest unaddressed issue, but one that I guess you could characterize as the forest instead of the trees, is the notion of digital trust. Ultimately, digital trust is the goal that I think digital privacy legislation or regulation is trying to achieve. But I think a lot of the discussion really focuses at the outset, on what are the regulatory or legislative approaches, as opposed to stepping back and looking at digital trust in a much more broad and holistic way. The other aspect that's interesting about digital trust, is that it's actually measurable. So we have a number of surveys that are being conducted by highly respected organizations, which help us track track perceptions of how consumers and users feel about the amount of trust they have for various digital services. So for example, Edelman, which is a worldwide public relations firm every year, they come out with a trust index. And that shows how various institutions including big tech is perceived by the public. And then also, the professional services firm KPMG, has conducted a series of war focused data privacy surveys that focus on this area of digital trust, I think net net, when you look at some of the surveys that are being done, you see that there is a large gap between the public terms of their perception of what they trust and how they trust. And obviously, on the other side, the commercial providers of digital services. So for example, the KPMG survey of 2020, which was the latest one, the majority of people in that survey, this trusted commercial provision of collection, storage and transmission of digital data. So we understand fundamentally, there is a trust problem. And when we talk about digital privacy, that tends to be ways that we try to address the problem. But I think the underlying issue really hasn't been focused on in the way that it should be.

 

Wayne Stacy  03:43

We'll to start I want to take a step back, because if you read the the average newspaper, it seems that the term digital privacy and digital trust are the terms digital privacy and digital trust are, are used interchangeably. And I don't think that's necessarily the correct way the industry is using those terms. So can you explain a little bit about the difference between digital trust and digital privacy?

 

Stuart Brotman  04:11

Well, I think digital trust, as I said, is really the broader term. And digital privacy