Infosys 204
For most of you, Assignment #3 proved to be the easiest of the three papers so far, and in the interests of time I won’t say much about the best arguments. I focused much of my attention in your papers on grammar, punctuation, and style, and if you don’t understand my markings or comments I encourage you to bring your paper and go over it with me.
I’m pleased to see that on the whole the papers have steadily improved in the user interface department--you’re all double-spacing and using adequate margins, and many of you have shown real signs of improvement in your organization, clarity, and writing style.
Most papers, however, could have benefited from one additional proofread and once again I encourage you to read your papers out loud, if only to yourselves, as the best way to find wordy, awkward, or incomplete sentences and paragraphs. Many of your sentences are just loaded with words that don’t earn their keep, and distract from the words that do. When in doubt, as my seventh grade creative writing teacher used to say, leave it out.
Some of you have clearly looked up the proper format for footnoting and in-line quotation. The more subtle rules for ellipses, partial quotations, and added emphasis, however, are your next challenge. Get a hold of a copy of the Chicago Manual of Style or the Harvard Blue Book or something like it and read it all the way through. Doing so will pay dividends far in excess of the cost.
Two other common problems are worth noting (or repeating in one case). Most of you do not understand the rules for when to use a comma, with the majority of abuses erring on the side of too often and too many.[1] Imagine that commas cost $5 each to use, and consider carefully each time you spend that much money whether the sentence is really improved by it. Often a comma isn’t necessary. The reader will naturally put the intended pause into a well-crafted sentence.
The second common problem is deciding when to make a new paragraph, and again the usual symptom is over-inclusion. If you have a set of arguments that begin, “There are several reasons why the proposed solution will not work,” then the reader’s eye will automatically expect that each reason will get its own paragraph rather than stuffing all of them into one giant (and eye-strain inducing) block of text. Don’t be afraid of short paragraphs—or rather, be more afraid of long paragraphs. (Note how nearly all my paragraphs are of a uniform length—this is by instinct and practice, not design. Now see how the next two paragraphs break that “rule,” and see if you can understand why in both cases it is the “right” thing to do.)
Inexplicably, a few of you are still making the same mistakes with regard to basic matters of punctuation, including putting quotation marks before punctuation (see Memo #1) and putting footnotes ahead of punctuation (see Memo #2). I can only conclude that you don’t think following the rules are important in this regard, and I only hope that in the rest of your studies someone else dissuades you of this notion. One of the chief goals of the SIMS program is to prepare you for professional life in I/S management, and, having spent my entire career in I/S management, I can only tell you that bad grammar, punctuation, and other indications of sloppiness will hold you back in your career. The same goes double for those considering an academic career. It is only in law journals that students will be there to fix your mistakes.
By the way, in the category of “please don’t eat the daisies,” you should always number your pages in some way. It’s just common courtesy to the reader
Since most of you “got” the assignment, I won’t say much about the substance. For the most part you followed my strong hint and organized your paper in the simplest way possible—that is, along the four questions I asked you to answer.
The “answer” for this assignment was pretty easy to find in the materials
themselves and I’m pleased that so many of you looked to the dissenting
opinions for help in identifying weaknesses in the report. A few of you made exceptionally good use of
other materials—both from the Reader and beyond—which wasn’t necessary but when
done right was quite effective.
With regard to the four parts, by and large the first three were the strongest. Most of you found some of the glaring problems in survey methodology but the better papers noted that the FTC fudged the data in ways that questioned the very “problem” they are purporting to solve. Do consumers really care about privacy? Is there any reason to believe that FIPP will allay their concerns if followed, or just the opposite? Is self-regulation working or not working? Why did the FTC leave off such important categories of websites that include adult, children, and non-.com sites (and remember, ANYONE can register any domain suffix; a .edu suffix was supposed to be used by educational institutions but there is no enforcement of that guideline)? What purpose does it serve to look for written disclosures but not to the actual compliance with those disclosures, other than to recognize the cost and difficulty of the latter?
This was clearly sloppy work, undertaken in a hurry to satisfy some constituency (perhaps Congress, perhaps the “public,” perhaps the business interests themselves) that wanted to see some “action” from the Commission. It may be that the FTC had no intention or expectation that its recommendations be followed, and so far they have not been. Who’s zooming who?
For the institutional bias, most of you noted that the FTC would want the data to come out in favor of more regulation, since they are the likely regulators and thus would become more powerful, but I’m not entirely certain of that. There is a difference in all governments between the appointed or elected officials and the tenured civil servants; indeed the tension between those two groups and their different agendas was the source of perhaps the best television program in history (aside from “The Simpsons,” of course): “Yes, Minister” (which became “Yes, Prime Minister” after the producers were told that Prime Minister Thatcher never missed it).
The more subtle institutional arguments were based on the limited technical abilities of the FTC which, given its long-time focus on investigating offline commercial practices, are likely significant (their “survey” methodology suggests more of this). Do they even know that .edu domains can be commercial? How third-party cookie placements work? How SSL protects inadvertent data interception? In the absence of any real understanding of the “domain” they are working in, perhaps it is not surprising that the emphasis in both the analysis and the recommendations is on written disclosure.
Many of you also noted the weakness of the perhaps necessary U.S. bias of the survey, analysis, and recommendations, and the possible perverse result that if the FTC only regulates U.S. Websites (whatever that means), then the incentive will be to take e-commerce offshore to avoid the extra cost (which is never discussed, nor is the benefit). Since the FTC can only exercise jurisdiction over trade practices in the U.S., it only studied the problem in the U.S. But what if this is a global problem where only a global solution will work? Is it likely that a federal agency might never see that?
The least-useful argument to make in the third section was that key terms were not adequately defined. This is, after all, a report, not draft legislation, so some degree of vagueness is natural. On the other hand, the FTC actually seems to be promoting a vague solution when Congress does legislate, which is more troubling. We can appreciate the reason for this suggestion, given the pace with which the online world is evolving. Strict standards and clear policies of what disclosures to include will become obsolete almost immediately, and perhaps counter-productive. But is the solution vague requirements, or simply no requirements at all? Again, without any sense of the real costs (to what extent are consumer concerns about privacy—and what does that mean, anyway?—holding back the development of ecommerce?), we can’t do much to evaluate a potential solution over its alternatives, including the alternative of doing nothing.
Perhaps the proposed solution will only make matters worse. If all that is required is printed disclosures, then the appearance of solving the problem will open a bigger gap between statements and actual practice, and consumers will become jaded and skeptical of companies who are legitimately trying to meet their privacy needs. If explicit notice is required, the likely result will be lawyer-crafted statements that no one will read, not more clearly defined policies.
This last section was the weakest, as many of you gave very general recommendations such as “clarify the Access requirement” but no indication of how that could be done or what the clarification would look like. Many of you noted that enforcement provisions are most notably undefined in the Report, but didn’t really say much about how you’d like to see enforcement handled in a cost-effective way. Perhaps the most useful improvement would be, as some suggested, to establish metrics for evaluating the actual effect of FIPPs in the first place; that is, to measure whether better disclosures (without anything more) did allay consumer fears, or if the causal link isn’t really there and perhaps never was.
Segregating the kinds of websites and establishing different standards for each (portals vs. news vs. commerce) seems to make a lot of sense, but likely beyond the abilities of the FTC or Congress to figure out. More categories mean more loopholes, unfortunately.
[1] This sentence needed the comma that appears after the word “comma.” Without it the clause “with the majority” would modify “comma” rather than signal the beginning of a new and independent clause. On the other hand, in this footnote there was no need for a comma after “Without it.”