At the end of last month the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) published its third annual report: Who’s got your back?. Its purpose is to show which service providers make most efforts to protect their users’ privacy when ‘government comes knocking’. The EFF report rates the providers’ performance in six categories ranging from ‘requires a warrant’ to ‘fights for users’ privacy rights in courts’. Eighteen providers from Amazon and Apple to Wordpress and Yahoo are rated.
Verizon and MySpace emerge without a single star to their credit, while Apple, AT&T and Yahoo earn just one apiece. Surprisingly to some, perhaps, both Facebook and Microsoft are mid-table with both earning three of the six available stars. Google earns 5, failing only in ‘tells users about government data requests’ (its Transparency Report, while praised, is not quite the same thing). But of least surprise is that the two clear winners, both earning all six stars, are Sonic.net and Twitter.
It is against this background that the possible recruitment of Nicole Wong to the White House can be seen as a presidential PR coup. It has to be said that as of writing the situation is far from clear. “President Obama has picked Nicole Wong, Twitter's legal director, to be the White House's first chief privacy officer,” writes Declan McCullagh in Cnet.
“The White House is reportedly considering hiring Twitter's Nicole Wong as part of its legal team to focus on privacy issues, though a final decision on the position has not yet been made,” says CNN.
Nicole Wong’s Twitter account says nothing – but she hasn’t denied it yet.
Wong has been Twitter’s legal director since November 2012. Before that she spent eight years with Google, becoming known as The Decider because of her role in choosing what could and could not be shown in which countries. In 2008 the New York Times wrote of her and her team, “They decide what controversial material does and doesn't appear on the local search engines that Google maintains in many countries in the world, as well as on Google.com. As a result, Wong and her colleagues arguably have more influence over the contours of online expression than anyone else on the planet.”
If the rumors prove true and Wong becomes Obama’s chief privacy officer, the nickname Decider may have to change to Advisor; but her sphere of influence will be even greater than she had with Google.