Balancing Privacy and Open Data: A Review of the Data and Privacy Approaches of the FCC's Measuring Broadband America Program's Mobile Performance Measurement

In 2010 the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) began an effort called for in the National Broadband Plan to improve the availability of information for consumers about their broadband services. The Measuring Broadband America program brought together the FCC's contractor, interested stakeholders from broadband providers, manufacturers, academia, public interest and other diverse groups in a transparent collaborative process to develop an open methodology for the collection, processing and reporting of consumer broadband performance. In 2011 the FCC released the first of three reports on results of measurements of the thirteen largest broadband providers that collectively account for 86 percent of all U.S. wireline consumer broadband connections, and in 2012 turned to the measurement of mobile broadband performance. In the first public meeting discussing the program efforts, the FCC explained its plan to develop information on mobile broadband service performance in the United States utilizing the collaborative policy development model underlying the success of its fixed broadband program. The FCC described its plans to leverage the existing open methodologies developed by its contractor, SamKnows LTD, and fixed collaborative for the active testing of broadband upload and download speeds, latency and packet loss, and the scientific management and execution of tests using a centralized scheduling, monitoring and measurement server infrastructure. The FCC described that the mobile program would use application software on Android smartphones to execute the open tests with measurement infrastructure, and confirmed that the mobile effort would maintain the Program’s founding principles of openness and transparency first described in 2010, use of non-proprietary testing methodologies supporting duplication of results by third parties, and the release of reports and Open Data supporting the analysis of released reports. The FCC held its first meeting of the mobile collaborative process on October 10, 2012 stating first on its agenda for the program was an exhaustive privacy review that would establish the effort’s technical and policy directions. The FCC discussed that the mobility of data introduced privacy considerations that required deeper review beyond the work done for its fixed effort, and expressed its intent to engage with diverse voices in developing its policies. In three months of meetings, the FCC’s "privacy by design" process developed with diverse stakeholders a novel, scalable, and anonymized collection and reporting approach that supported the collection of useful data the program was known for, but with an uncompromising commitment to protecting the privacy of the participants to the program. The paper discusses the FCC’s development of the process and approach that synthesized diverse privacy considerations from Federal and state government representatives, researchers and academics, data manufacturers, wireless carriers, of technical implementations, legal and operational concerns, consumer expectations and behavior, and commitments to openness and transparency. The paper describes the considerations that influenced the FCC adoption of a completely anonymized collection and data processing model, and a detailed review of the Privacy Notice and Terms of Use adopted for use with its mobile measurement data. The paper concludes by describing evolving privacy approaches and themes in the area and discusses approaches in other mobile measurement efforts in the US and abroad.