When does the free flow of personal data benefit consumers, and when might it damage their pocketbooks?
That question, at the heart of the debate over information economics and fairness, took center stage one day last month when Hal R. Varian, chief economist of Google, and Ashkan Soltani, chief technologist of the Federal Trade Commission, participated in a conference on big data and privacy at the Temple University Fox School of Business in Philadelphia.
Before an audience of professors and business students, Mr. Varian, a professor emeritus at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley, described the potential upsides of price discrimination — the practice of charging people different amounts for the same product, based on their age, location, creditworthiness or other details specific to them.
“It is largely beneficial,” Mr. Varian told the audience, citing examples like discount offers for seniors. He added, “You charge higher prices to people who can afford to pay higher prices.”
The argument was not unfamiliar to Mr. Soltani, a former student of Mr. Varian’s at Berkeley and a data privacy researcher whose work once helped the F.T.C. bring a landmark case against Google. But when it came time for his presentation, Mr. Soltani took the opposite stance, arguing that online data-mining is so opaque to consumers that it can lead to unfair financial treatment.
A few years ago, as a technical consultant for an investigative series in The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Soltani related, he studied how a consumer-profiling company collected details about the specific car makes, models and colors that individual shoppers looked at online, as well as the dates and number of times they looked at each car. When those shoppers subsequently made appointments to see the cars, he said, the company shared details about their online activities with their local dealerships.
Knowing how interested a customer is in a specific car, Mr. Soltani said, could give car dealers an unfair advantage in price negotiations.
“They are potentially able to extract higher prices,” he told the audience.
(Mr. Varian and Mr. Soltani both said they were speaking for themselves, not for their employers.)
The Federal Trade Commission is responsible for protecting consumers from deceptive or anticompetitive practices by companies. It has long hired computer scientists, as well as technically minded lawyers, to work on investigations of individual firms.
But in 2010, in an effort to help regulators keep current with rapid advances in technology — and understand the possible risks to consumers of novel uses of their data — the agency created the position of chief technologist. And in just a few years, it has established a tradition of appointing gadflies to the post, experts who have poked holes in companies’ assurances that they were keeping the public’s personal details safe and private.
The commission first tapped Edward W. Felten, a computer science professor at Princeton, to serve as chief technologist; he came to the agency after discovering security flaws in voting machines that hackers could have exploited to steal votes. More recently, Latanya Sweeney, a professor of government and technology at Harvard, served in the role; she famously demonstrated that it was possible to reidentify patients by name in the nameless medical records that hospitals routinely released to researchers.
Mr. Soltani’s worldview is similar to his predecessors’, but his résumé is different. At 40, he is younger and does not have their Ivy League affiliations. He is a populist who has conducted research into online consumer tracking and profiling for several national newspapers and government agencies.
In 2014, he was part of a team at The Washington Post that won a Pulitzer Prize in public service for a series of articles examining government surveillance techniques brought to light by the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden. (He has also worked as a researcher at The New York Times and provided technical assistance for the newspaper’s “You for Sale” series on the data brokerage industry.)
Along the way, Mr. Soltani has earned a reputation as a forensic specialist able to explain complicated technical processes in plain terms that policy makers and ordinary souls can understand.
“If the store you went into tracked everything you tried on and touched and then followed you to other stores, and the stores would all exchange notes, I think people would be uncomfortable with that and stop shopping,” Mr. Soltani said at the conference in Philadelphia. “But that is exactly what happens online.”
That kind of talk has not exactly endeared him to the online advertising industry. After Edith Ramirez, the chairwoman of the F.T.C., announced his appointment last fall, Politico ran a news item in which an executive at the Interactive Advertising Bureau, an industry group, suggested that the agency was doing itself a “disservice by hiring advocates.”
But Mr. Soltani’s fans credit him with matter-of-factly elucidating the inner workings of web and mobile services.
In a previous job at the F.T.C., in 2010, Mr. Soltani worked on an investigation of Google Buzz, a social network, in which he helped commissioners and staff lawyers understand the technical differences between the company’s public statements on user privacy and its actual practices. In 2011, regulators charged Google with deceptive privacy practices, contending that the company had enrolled Gmail users in its social network without offering them clear ways to opt out or control how the service shared their personal details. As part of a settlement with the agency, Google agreed to submit to regular, independent privacy audits for the next 20 years.
“He’s not a bomb thrower. He’s very much, ‘Here are the facts and that’s why we’re worried,’ ” David C. Vladeck, a professor of law at Georgetown, said of Mr. Soltani. Professor Vladeck, a former director of the F.T.C. Bureau of Consumer Protection, added, “For a small agency, you want somebody who is willing to stick to their guns when they’re right.”
As chief technologist, Mr. Soltani has helped the F.T.C. create a new unit, called the Office of Technology Research and Investigation, to enable the agency to examine a wider array of emerging technologies — including Internet-connected cars, connected home devices and mobile payment systems — and their potential implications for data security and privacy. Mr. Soltani said he was also working on recommendations for industry practices that could help promote innovation and consumer choice.
A few weeks ago, for instance, the agency filed a complaint against Nomi Technologies, a retail-tracking company that uses mobile phone signals to monitor shoppers’ movements in stores. According to the complaint, the company had failed to live up to its commitment to inform shoppers about its in-store surveillance and allow them to opt out.
Mr. Soltani subsequently wrote a blog post detailing technical solutions — like sending notices and opt-out messages directly to shoppers’ mobile phones — that could address that information asymmetry.
It seems the free flow of information benefits consumers most when the information flows in both directions.
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