Why is it that every move Tom Ridge makes sounds so incredibly dumb? The appointment of Nuala O’Connor Kelly to be the Department of Homeland Security’s privacy official may make political sense. She may even be the most qualified for the job. But why would an Administration that has been so under fire for potential threats to privacy (TIPS, TIA, Genisys, HumanID, CAPPS, etc.) name as its first privacy gatekeeper an ex-Doubleclick official? Didn’t these guys at least take Marketing 101? It may not be wrong, but it sure doesn’t look right.
Yes, I know she has not been with the evil ad-bot agency for over a year. Yes, I know her whole job there was to enforce privacy. But when you’re setting up an agency that will potentially have access to all their personal details, do you think people are going to trust someone from a company that has been sued by everyone under the sun for using collected data to profile and track customers?
Well, at least she’ll be no stranger to the world of Big Brother. I’m just waiting for the Homeland Security pop-up ads to start appearing on everyone’s site by law.
I thought her job at ClickClick was to clean up the mess that they already had with privacy issues. It seems like she is well suited for this job, unless she screwed the last one up, and I haven’t heard anything negative about her work.
I don’t have a problem with her, unlike many of the Administrations other appointments, but maybe there is more to it than I know about. Right now, she seems as related to bad privacy protection as Saddam was to 9/11.
It’s not her, necessarily (although I found it very difficult to find ANYTHING she’s said or done since being named chief counsel for the Commerce Dept’s Technology Admin). It’s perception. She may do a fine job, but the appearance is that they just gave the keys to privacy over to someone who worked for one of privacy’s worst enemies.
I’m not a big fan of doing things based on “perception”, rather than fact. That’s how we ended up in Iraq. Most Americans have the mistaken perception that Saddam was involved with the 9/11 attacks. Many Americans have the mistaken perception that Bush was elected President. Bush has the mistaken perception that god has ordained him to rid the world of evildoers. Perceptions are often wrong.
If the woman is an enemy of the public trust, let people explain how. There are real, obvious enemies in DC that I’m more worried about right now.
I like the idea of a Homeland Security pop-up ad; it would be a welcome change from all the Orbitz and CheapTickets ones. I think I read in David Pogue’s column at the NYT that there were basically six major advertisers plaguing the web with the vast majority of the pop-ups these days; Amex and those two are the ones I can think of offhand.
And her selection is maybe along the lines of “takes one to know one” or “fox to guard the henhouse,” ya think?