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You’ve brought major cases against Facebook and Google, and you’re requiring them to undergo audits every two years until 2032. What is the significance of those cases? These are examples of enforcement actions we brought to ensure that companies adhere to the promises they make to consumers about privacy.

n the meantime, your agency recommended that Internet companies voluntarily adopt a “Do Not Track” policy. What if they don’t?

That technology is coming to the U.S., and coming very quickly. It’s obviously a great convenience for consumers, but there are serious privacy and security issues.

A recent study looked at more than 500,000 tweets about depression, took 4,000 tweets that mentioned a diagnosis or medication, and followed those Twitter users in order to create an app that predicts suicide. This use of tweets crosses a line, Peel said. "This is far more intrusive" than standard data-gathering from social media.

Medical data is also valuable to criminals

Criminals are after electronic medical records, as well as prescriptions and insurance information to pay for their own medical expenses or to acquire prescription drugs illegally.

Government surveillance programs point up new data-mining concerns. But the NSA monitoring programs focus on collecting "meta" data—not the actual procedures you've undergone, but merely the records of things you searched for online, or people you telephoned. What can this metadata reveal? Plenty about your health, experts argue; simply knowing who you're calling can be just as revealing as what you say. If you can track a series of calls, one privacy expert tells tells the New Yorker's Jane Mayer, "you know exactly what is happening—you don’t need the content.”

David Vladeck began an inquiry into data brokers' practices, concerned that algorithms that mined for data patterns could create unfair stereotypes. (Vladeck recently stepped down.) For example, "whether someone would be classified as a health risk just because they bought products linked to an increased chance of heart attack," the Associated Press reports.

On the call with reporters, Mr. Vladeck said he had little patience with Google’s explanation, and referred to other privacy violations about which Google has also said it was unaware, like collecting personal data with its Street View cars. “As a regulator, it is hard to know which answer is worse — I didn’t know or I did it deliberately,”

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