White House Accelerates Drive to Improve Data Privacy

The White House accelerated its efforts on Thursday to bolster data privacy laws and announced a bid to scrutinize discriminatory pricing on the Internet, pressing to exert control on the use of data in Americans’ lives. A year after President Obama ordered a review of the vast collection and use of digital information by private companies, his top advisers announced that they had recruited a Republican ally for a bill to protect data collected from students’ educational apps. They said they were redoubling efforts to push broader measures, so far stalled in Congress, to safeguard consumer privacy.

And in a report released by Mr. Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, White House officials said they would scrutinize companies’ use of personal data to charge different customers different prices online. “This big data revolution presents incredible opportunities to transform health care, boost economic productivity and to make government work better and save taxpayer dollars,” said John D. Podesta, the counselor to the president, who has been leading the effort, “but at the same time, those technologies raise concerns about how we protect personal privacy and our other values.”

The president asked Mr. Podesta, who will leave his White House position Feb. 13, to lead the review last year after the leaks by Edward J. Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor. The renewed push from the White House came on the day after Anthem, one of the nation’s largest health insurers, said that the personal information of tens of millions of its customers, including its chief executive, had been compromised in a “very sophisticated external cyberattack.”

Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, said the breach was a “useful opportunity” to highlight Mr. Obama’s cybersecurity and privacy proposals. “We are hopeful that by working with Congress, we can make some important progress and take some steps that would actually safeguard the American people and their data,” Mr. Earnest said. The White House announced that its student-privacy initiative would be sponsored by Representative Luke Messer, Republican of Indiana, and Representative Jared Polis, Democrat of Colorado.

But more comprehensive measures that Mr. Obama favors have yet to find bipartisan support. They include a bill to give Americans more control over how their information is collected and used and a separate measure to require that consumers be notified within 30 days of a breach that compromises their data. The escalation of cyberattacks like the one on Anthem should add to the urgency, officials said. “I’m pretty confident that if we keep the pressure on, and the pressure keeps coming from data breaches, that we can both improve and enhance cybersecurity,” Mr. Podesta said, “as well as protect consumers by passing strong data-breach legislation.”

The report on differential pricing — when companies charge different amounts to different consumers for the same thing — did not propose new legislation or policies. The practice is not necessarily a problem, said Jason Furman, the chairman of Mr. Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, citing familiar examples such as movie theaters charging older adults less for a ticket and airlines giving frequent passengers special fares.

But the report said that the rise of data analytics and of companies collecting vast amounts of personal data on customers increased the risk that characteristics like race, age, gender or religion could drive how prices are set, leading to unfair prices on services like insurance for certain groups. “It raises new possibilities for businesses, new ways to empower consumers, but it also creates new challenges that we need to be very mindful of,” Mr. Furman said [NYTimes].