California Attorney General Uses Twitter To Threaten United Airlines With Possible Legal Action

from the pointless-privacy-policies dept

Can we just admit that laws requiring privacy policies are a dumb idea? They make almost no sense. No one reads them. And the laws requiring them don't require that you actually keep info private... just that you have one of those privacy policies that no one reads and no one cares about. The only ways you get in trouble are (a) if you don't have a privacy policy or (b) if you don't abide by your privacy policy. Thus, the basic incentive is to write a privacy policy that is opaque and which no one will read -- and which says "you have no privacy at all, we can do whatever we want with your data" so you could never violate it.

But grandstanding politicians see this as an easy and cheap way to be seen as "protecting the little guy" even though it does nothing along those lines. It appears that California Attorney General Kamala Harris may be jumping into the fray -- and bizarrely using Twitter to passive aggressively threaten United Airlines. In a tweet, she asks the company where its privacy policy is on its mobile app:

Fabulous app, @united Airlines, but where is your app’s #privacy policy? 1.usa.gov/SWGCTm

— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) October 12, 2012

That link is to California's law that requires privacy policies. But, once again, we're at a loss to see what this does for actual privacy, if anything. If the app doesn't have a privacy policy, does that change how United Airlines uses people's data? Doubtful. Is anyone who uses the app actually reading the privacy policy? Doubtful. If they do, will they understand it? Unlikely. So, what does this kind of thing do? You'd think that there were, perhaps, more pressing things for the state to focus on rather than harassing companies on Twitter.

Filed Under: apps, california, kamara harris, privacy policy
Companies: twitter, united airlines