The White House, hoping to move
the national debate over privacy beyond the National Security Agency’s
surveillance activities to the practices of companies like Google and Facebook,
released a long-anticipated report on Thursday that recommends developing
government limits on how private companies make use of the torrent of
information they gather from their customers online.
The report, whose chief author is John D. Podesta, a senior
White House adviser, is the next step in the administration’s response to the
disclosures by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor, that began the
debate.
Because the effort goes so far beyond information collected by
intelligence agencies, the report was viewed warily in Silicon Valley, where
companies see it as the start of a government effort to regulate how they can
profit from the data they collect from email and web surfing habits.
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