Our Proposal for an American Privacy Compact

At Starry, we have a pretty simple, two-word philosophy that drives everything we do: “Customer First.”

From the technology we develop to the service you experience in your home, customer first means putting the subscriber at the heart of everything we do.

That’s why last week we filed a letter with the Federal Trade Commission proposing the creation of a Privacy Compact with Americans to serve as guiding principles for consumer privacy protection. We believe that adopting this Privacy Compact would lay down a marker and create an easy-to-understand set of privacy commitments for consumers, who today struggle to understand their privacy rights and the government’s role in protecting them.

Our proposed Privacy Compact with Americans is comprised of the following core set of promises protecting all Americans’ private information:

• All Personal Information is Protected Equally: All information that relates to a person’s physical or digital life is personal information and should be treated the same.
• Disclosure is Mandatory: Any entity that collects or uses Personal Information must explicitly and clearly explain the Personal Information it is collecting, what it will do with the information, whether they intend to sell it and the other entities with which it intends to share the information.
• Permission is Required: Personal Information can only be collected when the person agrees to have their information collected and can only be used for the reasons that the person permits. Permission must be renewed at least annually.
• Personal Information Collection Must be Minimized: Entities that collect Personal Information must collect the smallest data set necessary to achieve the purpose for which the person provided the information.
• Transparency, Transferability, and Deletion are Rights: People have a right to know their Personal Information that an entity currently has, the right to receive that information in a format that is shareable and useable by another party and the right to quickly delete that information from any entity that holds it.

Combined, these tenets provide a clear set of commitments to all Americans under which the privacy of their Personal Information is prioritized and protected. They also form the baseline from which the FTC can view and approach privacy on a going forward basis. It is a simple starting point, but it is a start.

If you want to learn more about our proposed Privacy Compact with Americans, you can read our full letter to the FTC right here.

For more information on Starry’s own privacy policy and privacy commitments, check out our full privacy policy.